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Go Home The Movie Review: 'Bruno'

BOOKS AND ARTS JULY 10, 2009

The Movie Review: 'Bruno'

BY CHRISTOPHER ORR

Like journalism, comedy is generally most appealing when it afflicts the comfortable. This is especially true of the particular brand of humor pioneered by Sacha Baron Cohen, which functions as a kind of Bizarro cousin to journalism, an uninvited excavation of real people’s buried bigotries and secret shames.

Baron Cohen's latest foray into the cinema of deception and discomfort, Bruno, is, like his prior effort Borat, envelope-shredding and, for the most part, hilarious. But like Borat, it is also on occasion an unsavory enterprise, one that takes scattered shots at elites before settling down to the business of mowing down the masses, on the evident premise that an awful lot of people (perhaps most people) hold views so reprehensible that they deserve to be exposed through trickery, and then ridiculed.

As Borat, Baron Cohen accomplished this feat by feigning an Old World primitivism on subjects such as women and Jews, and daring his marks to concur or, at least, to let his comments stand uncontested. As Bruno, he takes the opposite tack. Rather than directly encourage expressions of prejudice, he instead offers an irresistible target: a flamboyantly gay, 19-year-old Austrian fashion maven, who is also a committed exhibitionist, a passive-aggressive sexual predator, and a pathological fame junkie. It's not hard to imagine what will happen when he is released into the heartlands of America.

And released he is, after a fashion-runway mishap in his native Vienna results in the cancelation of his television show "Funkyzeit mit Bruno." As Bruno explains, "For the second time in a century, the world had turned on Austria's greatest man, just because he had the bravery to try something new."

Denied the fame he so richly deserves in his homeland, he pursues it here by any means available: taking a role as an extra on "Medium"; trying to entice Congressman Ron Paul into making a sex tape with him; flying to the Middle East to broker a peace agreement; swapping an iPod for an African baby; and hosting a halfhearted celebrity interview show that culminates with his penis dancing a variation of the can-can. (I feel obligated to report that his anatomy makes the mercury jump far above ninety-three, and not in a good way.)

The gags are typically sexual, frequently shocking, and, more often than not, hysterical. I, for one, am unlikely ever to look at an exercise bike, a vacuum cleaner, or bungee cords quite the same way again. And if you ever happened to wonder what an extended pantomime of a same-sex "one man band" would look like, well, prepare to have your curiosity satisfied.

Gradually though, the Teutonic fashionistas and Hollywood hangers-on give way to more downscale, red-statey targets. A gay-conversion Christian is told that his lips were made to do something other than praise Jesus. An Alabama hunter has to fend off a late-night visit from a naked intruder. And attendees of the ultimate fighting contest "Straight Dave's Man-Slammin' Max Out" are unexpectedly treated to an altogether different form of man-on-man spectacle. Some of these segments are funny, but they're more than a touch unpleasant as well, even if none approaches the cruelty of the rodeo Muslim-hater and drunken fraternity brother scenes in Borat. It seems clear, moreover, that Baron Cohen is well aware of what he is doing, as both films open with mostly-scripted humor, move on to celebrity encounters (Bob Barr and Alan Keyes in Borat, Paula Abdul and Harrison Ford in Bruno), and only later, after establishing the audience's goodwill, devolve into rube-bashing.

It's an odd cop-out for so fiercely gifted a comedian. At 37, Baron Cohen has already assembled a more interesting stable of distinct comic types--not just Ali G, Borat, and Bruno, but also Jean Girard, Julien, and Pirelli--than perhaps any actor since Peter Sellers. This is not a man who is doomed to be Allen Funt, or for that matter, Ashton Kutcher. He doesn't need to rely on the easy titillations and voyeuristic pull of reality TV, as evidenced by the fact that many of the funniest scenes in his films haven't involved "civilians" at all. He can--and, one hopes, will--do better than this.

Christopher Orr is a senior editor at The New Republic.

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16 comments

Good to see Ron Paul calling him a "queer." Jamie was right.

- Drick

July 10, 2009 at 3:05am

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so I don't understand your review. you talk about how funny it is and then you call it a cop out. Was it worth $10 bucks or not? Was it as good as Borat?

- Maxblum13

July 10, 2009 at 3:40am

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Good review Chris. I haven't seen Bruno but I saw Borat. I laughed a lot in the theater. But later, the movie soured on me because Cohen ridicules every day schmoes while allowing -- for the most part -- celebrities like Pamela Anderson to be in on his jokes. From the reviews I'm reading about Bruno, this appears to be more of the same.

- JC

July 10, 2009 at 10:35am

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You know, Cohen would be a whole lot funnier if he stayed in England and humiliated his fellow countrymen (country women and just plain old country creatures) without them being in on the attempted joke. He is the empressario of the cheap shot. Of course the average guy harbors a lot of ugly ideas and opinions; hey, that's what makes the world a great place to be, no? We just don't need a Boreat to slap us all in the face with it.

- Marshmallow

July 10, 2009 at 12:39pm

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Heterosexuals have oppressed gay people for millennia. Heterosexuals are outsiders with prejudices to homosexuality. They are not capable of knowing what is anti-gay. This movie only serves to validate heterosexuals wrong and bigoted prejudices of gay men. If SBC really had balls, his next movie would be called "Hymie", about Hymie, a greedy Jewish banker, who along with his big hooked nose, curly hair and constant use of "Oy vey", kvetches his way through life, plotting to steal Christian babies and install a Jewish run world government, avoiding anything physical because we all know that Jews can't play sports. Now *that* would be ballsy. Yeah, hell'd freeze over before he'd do something like that, easier to do that boring routine with gay people.

- Jacob

July 10, 2009 at 2:35pm

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Jacob and Marshmellow... Suck it up. Typical weak individuals who think that people care that your feelings are hurt. Makes me think that you both are too insecure to take a joke. I feel like you're the one who should grow some balls.

- Tommy

July 10, 2009 at 4:55pm

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What makes Sacha Cohen such a brilliant comic, perhaps the best of our generation, is that he relentlessly follows the natural flow of humor wherever it goes. Humor, at its very core, is cruel and all good comedy spares nobody in its quest for a joke. The homophobes and rednecks are perfect targets to be lampooned and laughed at in "Bruno", but so are flaming gays who act and dress so outlandishly in public. Nobody has a right NOT to be offended by anyone's humor, either.

- frilz1

July 12, 2009 at 5:06pm

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I don't find SBC funny. At all.

- Sherri

July 12, 2009 at 11:09pm

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aw gurd that guy is no gurd to ow country. he mocks americans like they ar stoopid and inwood thinking. i so wanna kill dat bastard.

- bigkev

July 13, 2009 at 11:38am

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Sherri--Try Ali G (if you have already, well then, OK, you don't find him funny). I often find that his situations are too painful to watch (Borat excerpts were enough for me). I don't think I'll see Bruno but those excerpts cracked me up. But Ali G kills me and for those segments alone, I think he is f*&in' brilliant!

- ericad

July 13, 2009 at 12:18pm

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I also want to know whether this is worth $10 and a babysitter or whether to watch it in reruns, or is it so uncomfortable that I should skip it altogether. I love how committed SBC is to his characters, but I find myself covering my eyes like it's a slasher horror show. What's the wince factor here?

-

July 13, 2009 at 2:51pm

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The Marx brothers of the twenty first century.

- Klaus

July 13, 2009 at 3:47pm

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I saw it last night. I spent a good portion of the movie watching it through the spaces between my fingers....very high wince factor (and I thought Borat was great). Some of it was very funny, but a lot of it was just done for shock value. Problem is the character is very unsympathetic. Also, it seemed to be just a bunch of random scenes put together. I would give it a 6/10.

- AMS

July 15, 2009 at 4:02pm

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walks a fine line helps not too be easily offended

- nietzsche

July 16, 2009 at 5:52pm

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I do not really care for SBC as others have alluded to here, because he is an elitist. He does let those he desires as "friends, or possible friends" in on the joke. It really is not all that difficult to make others look the fool if you control the films edit. SBC and his girlfriend (he may have married the wedding crasher girl at this point, I cannot be bothered to look it up), are INTENSELY PRIVATE people. Were someone of a similar bent shove a mike and camera into his or her face while they were just living their lives, HE WOULD FREAK! I think the guy would become physically aggressive in real life when faced with the slightest threat while not in character. Steve Allen was a master at taking really smart people and making them look foolish in his time. The difference was that he invited them along for the joke openly and they pretty much laughed along with him/themselves/us during the ride. Jay Leno is good at this also. There are others. To me at this point SBC while intelligent and creative is really not a very nice man in real life. He is quite hypocritical in his methods. He does prey on the simple minded, and some pretty smart people in these silly movies. I am certain that there are instances where he commenced his Anti-Semitic/Flaming Gay/White Boy acting street shtick (I may have misspelled that, I am Catholic and do not spell in Yiddish very well) and was rebuffed or went down in flames. Kinda' like Michael Moore. Another guy that controls the edit unfairly nowadays. SBC has been called to account for being his character on many occaisions, perhaps more often than the joke works, and we will probably never see the good folks that refuse to allow the vile behavior of his characters to go unchallenged. This being said, I have not seen the movies in their entire length. I have seen enough. I think I have seen all I need to. I find him both insulting and embarrassing for the victims, SBC himself, and my ethical standards. There are billions of people in this world that you can portray as a fool if you control the edit, and pay them for their time. This is my two cents.

- Chug

July 18, 2009 at 11:15pm

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I think that the velcro fashion fiasco actually occurs in Milan, not Vienna. May be wrong though.

- Robert

July 20, 2009 at 2:41pm

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