Rachael Flinches, Groans and Belly Laughs Her Way Through Bruno
I've loved Sascha Baron Cohen's hilarious satirical creations since Seth Rogen was writing for Da Ali G Show. I saw Borat two months before the rest of the world, and spent the intervening two months annoying everyone with my "It's niiiiiiiiice" and "I liiiiiike you" impressions. I thought Borat was occasionally line-crossing, consistently hilarious guerilla satire at its finest.
So I guess you could say I went into Bruno with high expectations, despite the fact that the character of Bruno himself was always my least favorite on Da Ali G Show. And the movie itself was... well... naked.
The problem with Bruno is that it relies too much on shocking nudity and outlandish gay stereotypes and too little on the type of insightful, shocking people into revealing their true colors awesomeness that made Borat so awesome. Let's compare two scenes. In Borat, a bunch of beers and a foreign dude got a cadre of frat boys from University of South Carolina to open up about their inner slave-wanting, women-hating mysoginist racism. In Bruno, it takes Bruno literally stripping down to nothing and trying to climb into a man's tent to get a rise, and even then it's not a hate-filled diatribe against gay folks so much as it is the dawning realization that the mountain man has been duped and that this whole thing is a show.
Because Bruno goes to such ridiculous extremes, you end up identfiying far more with his victims. At a certain point, not even the most tolerant person wants to watch two random dudes have sex in the middle of a wrestling ring. It doesn't excuse the awful things the fans say, nor the homophobic aura of the entire event. Those things are still awful, and definitely a great example of the kind of satire this movie should have more of, but by the point that the two men are undressing each other in public, I gotta say... I'd probably walk out too. And that's not Cohen unveiling my hidden prejudices as an audience member (although I do think occasionally this was his purpose). I was equally grossed out by the swingers scene, which was 100% straight.
There's a valid satirical point made occasionally in Bruno, and it has some biting scenes. The stage moms willing to let their children do anything for a pathetic little slice of fame is a particularly good scene, and you can almost see Cohen's wheels turning as he keeps upping the ante trying to get the mom's to say no. The overall point about celebrity and its sick obsession with fame is pretty well made, if not exactly as deeply revealing as the hidden mysoginy and anti-semitism of Borat.
The scenes of Bruno in the Middle East are pretty damn funny, if too short. At the same time, it's pretty random, like a lot of the plot. It's actually nearly the exact same plot as Borat: a foreign dude comes to the US, travels around with a male companion, eventually gets in a huge fight with said male friend (over sex, and while naked), gets sad and goes through a dark period, then reunites with the friend in order to end the movie. In Borat, this felt (slightly) more organic. In Bruno, it's just a slight excuse to justify the goofy scenes.
The homophobia stuff is occasionally awesome. A scene with a "conversion" Preacher, who Bruno enlists to try and help him turn straight like "John Travolta and Tom Cruise," is exactly what this movie could have used more of: a cool expose on the structures of homophobia. Plus, it's funny.
A lot of this movie is laugh out loud funny, if you can stomach the stuff in between. In fact, it's so funny at points that I honestly wondered if maybe I was just missing the satirical point. But I don't think I was. I think that the movie suffered from Borat's fame (making it harder for Cohen to find interview subjects who didn't know about Da Ali G Show) and a sense of self-satisfaction that kept it from elevating past the point of being just a funny movie. And it's a really hard to recommend movie, given that so much of it made me want to claw my eyes out*.
I'm embedding a video from EW of their two movie critics fighting about Bruno, because I think it's a nice synopsis of the battle going on in my head regarding the movie: