Bruno: He's Here, You're Queer—Get Used To It

Bruno has more in common with Zoolander than Men on Film.

After seeing Sacha Baron Cohen's Bruno (which I was predisposed to like since I liked Borat), it's unbelievable to me that anyone would mistake it for gay-bashing or even innocently bad for the gays, and yet it's completely perfect this would happen because the entire movie and character are about the tense hilarity that exists around the edges of any situation involving someone's utter lack of self-awareness.

Yes, Bruno is gay. But unlike most stereotypical gay representations—the lisping screamer—he more closely resembles a plausible member of the reality-TV generation, obsessing over fame and fashion and exposing his ignorance of world affairs and the English language as freely as his penis. Unlike the usual gay buffoon, who's all double-entendres and yet somehow sexless, he is depicted as an erotically resourceful Eurotrashionista with a taste in men that runs the gamut from clearly disinterested redneck hunters to dildo machines.

Brittny Gastineau was duped into saying she thought Jamie Lynn Spears should abort her retarded baby.

But while there are many gay moments (including a couple that feel like stale potshots—hamsters...really?), the movie is not about his gayness as the source of the humor. It's a given that he's gay, and if you're going to like the movie or even sit all the way through it, you're going to have to be down with the gays. But you're also going to have to feel that gay people can sometimes be self-absorbed and shallow, and that poking fun at those conditions is a hoot.

The reason Bruno, the character, is so funny is not that he is a gay minstrel, but that if you take him for who he is, it's impossible not to laugh at his relentless inability to see himself as silly, taboo-breaking, outrageous, immodest and unattractive. He is all of these things, but what makes him such a crack-up are those psychic blinders that are his trademark accessories. Watching him interact with the public as if he is just a regular guy who wants superfame is hard to do with your mouth closed.

Yeah, Bruno as a character is just too far-fetched to believe...

But Bruno—who at least has the excuse of being a fictional character—is not the only one with no idea how he looks and sounds to other people. The real stars of Bruno are the unsuspecting idiots who struggle to take Bruno at face value, sometimes saying and doing mortifying things while under his spell or simply embarrassing themselves by overreacting to an obviously phony situation and provocateur.

Only one fooled person seems to realize it, muttering, "Why am I even asking this question?" after asking Bruno something nonsensical—it's like watching angry popstars being intervied by Triump the Insult Comic Dog.

The biggest question isn't gay or anti-gay but Sasha's dick or a dick double?

It's squirmy watching some of the targets floating in the suspension of their own disbelief, but I don't see how anyone could truly feel sorry for them. How can you pity parents who are so eager to get their  babies an acting job that they agree to let their kids be surrounded by amateur scientists, antiquated heavy equipment and acid, or who agree to lipo on their 30-pound toddler in order to help her lose 10 pounds in a week? How can you feel bad for Ron Paul—a right-wing presidential candidate who attempted to downplay his blatant racist past during his campaign and a seasoned vet of filmed appearances when he allows himself to be alone in a bedroom with a stripping male seducer, exiting while shouting, "He's queer!? None of the marks in this movie are deserving of our pity, least of all Paula Abdul, who despite having a publicist whose job it is to check things out still has no problem sitting on some Mexican workers as if they're furniture while accepting a humanitarian award.

"Kiss my arschvitz!"

None of these marks has a clue how foolishly they're behaving, or how offensive their reactions and comments usually are, but Cohen does—his eye is rarely off the ball.

The movie gets edgier and riskier when Bruno decides he has to be straight in order to be famous in America, itself a savage joke at the expense of Tom Cruise, John Travolta and Kevin Spacey, who are identified as examples of this requirement. At this point, Bruno mixes it up with ex-gay proponents (people who are not only self-unaware, they're aggressively trying to deny their selves!) and eventually finds himself surrounded by blood-thirsty white-trash fight fans in a situation where he has no choice but to make out with his slavishly devoted male assistant. That scene had me uncomfortable, but not because I felt another audience might see this and root for Bruno's demise, but because these were real bigots, and their ugliness filled a theater previously bubbling with a more controlled satire.

GLAAD, which has done lots of good for gay people, issued a statement that does themselves no good with the younger part of their constituency. In it, they condemn this very funny movie with the claim that Bruno "decreases the public's comfort with gay people." GLAAD feels a "scene" (it's actually an obviously PhotoShopped still photo) in which Bruno is shown in a hot tub with his purchased African baby as one guy appears ready to rim another doesn't "help Americans understand the hundreds of thousands of gay families who get up every day, do the carpool then rush home to make dinner and be with their children."

Well...no shit! I don't think Bruno is meant to be an ad for how gay people are not only worthy of everyone else's respect but also boring as hell. The earnest desire to be seen as Ozzie & Ozzie to the rest of the country's Ozzie & Harriet is partly what makes Bruno's over-the-top sex scenes so hysterically funny—Bruno believes he and his pygmy boyfriend are just stay-at-home types of the variety GLAAD is championing. And GLAAD believes that they are protecting and sticking up for LGBT people by scripting a disapproving press release regarding this film. (They must be especially disappointed since the filmmakers allowed their input and yet the scenes they objected to the most were left in. I wish GLAAD would realize they're on thin ideological ice when they're on the same side as Christian groups, who are protesting Bruno as being "obscene" and "perverse.")

I fail to see how anyone could take exception with Bruno's humor and embrace "Jack McFarland."

Also worth noting is that like Borat, Bruno scores by mining racial discomfort for laughs, mainly thanks to Bruno's swapped-for-an-iPod black baby O.J. (watch the black Richard Bey audience turn on Bruno only after he acknowledges he's gay) and plenty of Hitler jokes. One race-based joke that lampooned Bruno's irreverence for history was his bored command that models in a fashion show "throw your shoulders back, it's a fashion show not a slave auction."

Not everything works and the film (I'd give it three stars out of four) feels slight and patchy like Borat; it's a shame the LaToya Jackson scene had to go and I would have liked to have seen Bruno demonstrating for Proposition 8. (Probably too soon.)

The film's use of famous do-gooders singing an un-PC charity song should be the final evidence of its goal—having self-awareness can be fun and funny, having none at all can be hilarious.

Comments

[heph]

Oh I have been waiting for your review with baited breath Matt.

So now that you have given it the all clear I can´t wait to see it.

I wish they would have left in the LaToya scene. I also hope that Sasha comes out and tells the truth about the Eminem spoof.
So far everyone is giving Eminem the benefit of the doubt, but I am almost 100 pct. certain that he was not forwarned about the bare ass. His hilarious exit with his enraged bouncers out of the theater looked genuine to me.

It was disaster! It wasn´t Dafor it was Dafive!!! I had to declare jihad on Haggen Dass!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gymK8WOXnYI

[Lucrece]

I have met many Brunos across my life. They exist, and they're pissed about being mocked.

With that said, Bruno does cause harm, however unintended. I have already become aware of a new trend straight men are using for calling effeminate men Bruno in a pejorative manner. And this very same audience that went to the movies is only ever more energized to indulge in gay panic humor among their peers. The gay anxiety antics among straight men will be revived for a while.

[Walter Newkirk]

bravo Matt...i agree with everything you say...i was howling and LMAO for most of the movie...for those who work in PR and media...this was brilliant satire.