The fax in Ali G: Who Iz I? is a good prop because it does two jobs at once. It gives a suddenly prospective father a reason to go looking for an HBO deal he believes he is owed. It also turns the age of the character into a practical problem. A document from a different television era falls into the hands of someone who thinks that era can resume whenever he is ready to report for work. Sacha Baron Cohen is good at playing the certainty of a man confronted with a fact that should make him profoundly embarrassed.
The rest of the film has to find a world that can apply enough pressure to that certainty. One reason Ali G once worked as an interviewer was that a guest had an interest in remaining polite to him. Nobody wanted to be the first person to announce that the interview had become absurd. The guest’s conduct in those extra seconds supplied the comedy. Celebrity, and the ease with which a strange exchange can now be turned into a clip, change the bargain. A person who believes a stunt might make them briefly famous has a different incentive to play along.
The movie recognizes part of that change by sending Ali toward a right-wing network that sees value in giving him a platform. A broadcaster can find him useful precisely because his misunderstandings are likely to keep a segment circulating. This is a worthwhile variation on the old mechanism. The network has business reasons to welcome a guest other people might have endured out of manners. The film seldom stays with that transaction for long enough to let it become as unsettling as it is funny. Much of the surrounding plot seems impatient to get back to the question of whether Ali can get away with what he says.
The filmed apology that uses generated appearances by famous dead people makes one of the film’s better points about a new use for an old kind of fakery. An apology is itself something a media operation can assemble. Familiar figures can be made to confer a kind of cultural authority even when the occasion gives them no coherent reason to be there. The idea is funny enough without the narrative doing much work on its behalf. Its limit is that the piece plays as a conspicuous stunt in a film already doing a great deal to convince us that stunts remain consequential.
Julie’s pregnancy is supposed to raise the price of coming home empty-handed. Morgana Robinson can help turn the familiar obligation into something sharper by making Julie feel like a person who has heard this man tell his story many times. The film has fewer uses for that familiarity than it has for a new set of people astonished by him. An Ali G story can afford to make its lead ridiculous for long stretches. It could make him more interesting still by giving the people obliged to live with him a larger share of the joke.
There is something sad and potentially productive in the costume still fitting. The wraparound glasses and sports gear give the older man a means of looking publicly like someone his own home life can barely sustain. Baron Cohen can use that disparity without requiring the audience to have fond memories of the old interviews. The character’s interest in being recognized is even more revealing when the person who recognizes him is too young to remember why he became known. A few more encounters governed by that kind of misunderstanding would let his age do some of the work the script assigns to topical arguments.
The tension between staged encounters and unwitting participants remains one of the reasons to be curious about Baron Cohen’s work. The dividing line matters most when an encounter changes the way we understand somebody’s investment in keeping it going. Here the fictional scaffolding too often announces what the encounter is meant to demonstrate. A man living on the delayed proceeds of a joke from twenty years ago is a strong comic subject. Making him the central exhibit in a debate over what comedy is allowed to do gives him an argument where he could have used more difficult company.
