Continuing gay week here at my blog, I saw “Bruno” last night. Here’s my conclusion: Sacha Baron Cohen is a brilliant performance artist. And don’t see this movie.
What’s the point? You’ll laugh, but you’ll be grossed out, too. It’s not going to convince bigots to adopt a live-and-let-live philosophy. And it’s just going to disturb the rest of us to be reminded that there are so many stupid people out there.
Bruno, of course, is a gay Austrian fashion reporter. No real person in the entire world has a personality as over-the-top as his, yet real people constantly think he’s real — and there’s your movie. Bruno’s “German” speech — a blend of an extreme accent and gibberish (for example, making “box” into a 10-syllable German word) is an insane parody of the actual language — it’s just as extreme as Cohen’s “Kazakhstani” Borat. And no gay person in the world behaves like Bruno, even the most stereotypical one you can imagine.
That’s the joke, and the point. When Bruno (in disguise as “Straight Dave”) fires up an ultimate fighting crowd in Arkansas, they are predictably horrified when Bruno and his producer stop fighting and start kissing and tearing each other’s clothes off. My reaction wasn’t so much, “How wrong of that crowd to express their bigotry.” It was more like: “How can that crowd possibly think this is real?”
I assume there are plenty of unwitting extras in “Bruno” who recognize the farce (indeed, if you watch faces closely in the daytime talk show sequence, you’ll notice a few skeptical expressions). For the most part, “Bruno’s” editors focus on the “good” material, the stuff where Bruno convinces a church’s “gay converter” or a politician or a terrorist leader that he’s a real person, not an actor.
But is all of that stuff real? Some scenes, like the karate instructor who fights off a dildo-wielding Bruno, are so absurd there’s no way they could’ve been made up. And yet at the same time, there’s no way any of this could be real. Could it?
Look, I laughed a lot, and I got Cohen’s message: The human race is full of ridiculous people. It comes through pretty clear. But in addition to the message, there are also images shoved in your face that I’d rather not describe in a family blog.
“Bruno” pushes the envelope. Sacha Baron Cohen is brilliant. But I wouldn’t recommend this movie to anyone. Instead, see something that’ll make you feel good about humanity.