Baron Cohen's "The Dictator" offers political script

One of the obvious differences between The Dictator, the new Sacha Baron Cohen comedy, and Borat and Bruno, his 2006 and 2009 endeavors, is that the latter two, of course, were real.

That is, they presented themselves as documentary-like affairs, with Baron Cohen's Kazakh TV personality and Austrian fashion journalist, respectively, inserting themselves into real-life situations with real-life people. Unscripted. Let the fur fly.

In The Dictator, Baron Cohen plays General Admiral Haffaz Aladeen, the ruler of a fictional North African republic. Any similarity to fallen despots Saddam Hussein and Moammar Gadhafi is purely coincidental. There was a standard-length screenplay. There was a $65 million production budget. There were professional actors, and visual effects, and sets.

That said, Baron Cohen and his director, Larry Charles — the man who steered the British comedian through his two hit mock-docs — were ready to improvise at the drop of a hat. Or a freshly decapitated head.

"In Borat and Bruno, you didn't know what the other person was going to say," explains Charles, on the horn from Los Angeles on the eve of The Dictator's opening on Wednesday. "But you're kind of hoping that if the questions are asked right, that they will elicit certain comments that will be really funny, will lead to great reactions, lead to great situations, and also at the same time push the story forward.

"Here, with The Dictator, we had a script, absolutely, but we all knew going in that we were going to improvise, that we were going to ad lib, that we were going to try different takes — which is a luxury that Sacha and I had never had: a second take.

"We'd done eight-hour scenes, but they've been one take. A nonstop eight-hour scene. So here we were able to stop, if we felt it was going wrong, if we wanted to try something different, if we wanted to make something up, we could try all kinds of alternatives to what was on the page."

In other words, the screenplay — credited to Baron Cohen, Alec Berg, David Mandel, and Jeff Schaffer — provided the foundation, and Baron Cohen and his castmates, including Anna Faris, Ben Kingsley, and Megan Fox (as herself), took off from there.

"We were really able to riff off the script in all kinds of ways," Charles says.

One particular speech, however, was delivered very much as writ. Addressing a throng of skeptical New Yorkers, Baron Cohen's visiting oligarch contrasts what he sees as the virtues of a dictatorship with the bad stuff about a democracy. Here's a chunk of it:

"Why are you guys so anti-dictators? Imagine if America was a dictatorship. You could let 1 percent of the people have all the nation's wealth. You could help your rich friends get richer by cutting their taxes and bailing them out when they gamble and lose. You could ignore the needs of the poor for health care and education. Your media would appear free, but would secretly be controlled by one person and his family. You could wiretap phones. You could torture foreign prisoners. You could have rigged elections. You could lie about why you go to war. You could fill your prisons with one particular racial group and no one would complain. You could use the media to scare the people into supporting policies that are against their interests."

Note the irony.

Charles, for one, is especially proud of this speech, and welcomes the suggestion that it could be up there on the Web, posted by fans who captured the General Admiral's oration on their smartphones. They could play this scene at Occupy rallies.

"It has that kind of potential, to go viral — at least I think it does," Charles says. "Hopefully, it won't be pirated — I'm sure Paramount would not be happy about that, but hopefully that speech will have its own life. …

"It's sort of a singular statement to make today, especially in a mainstream popular movie.

"That's the challenge of our movie in general, and certainly specifically right there, is to take subject matter that really isn't funny at all — it's kind of grim — and find a way to make it funny, and to make it true, to resonate as deeply as it can with people."

And to throw in gross stuff while they're at it.

'Moonrise' on the Croisette Wes Anderson'sMoonrise Kingdom, a tale of (early) teenage love on the run, opened the 65th Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday and seemed to go over pretty darn well.

"His most fully realized work" — Karina Longworth, L.A. Weekly. "Eccentric but heartfelt" — Peter Bradshaw, the Guardian. "A poignant metaphor for adolescence itself" — Peter Debruge, Variety.

Starring Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward as kids who escape summer camp and have all the grown-ups — Frances McDormand, Bill Murray, Edward Norton, Jason Schwartzman, Tilda Swinton — chasing after them, Moonrise Kingdom is, in both the pro and the (few) con write-ups, being described as classic Anderson, with all the stylistic tics and traits that define the filmmaker's work.

The soundtrack, too, available on Abkco Records on Tuesday, is right in keeping with the scores and song selection of Anderson's previous work, from Bottle Rocket onward. Music by Benjamin Britten, Francoise Hardy, Hank Williams, Devo cofounder Mark Mothersbaugh, Fantastic Mr. Fox composer Alexandre Desplat, and chunks of "The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra" set the mood.

Moonrise Kingdom finds its way from Cannes to American movie screens beginning Friday, though it's not set to open in the Philly area until (boo, hiss) mid-June.

Contact Steven Rea at 215-854-5629 or srea@phillynews.com. Read his blog, "On Movies Online," at www.philly.com/onmovies.