Vassap!
Before I launch into any reactionary paragraph about what I thought about Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest farce-cum-documentary Brüno, it should be known right off the bat that it’s probably one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen from a major movie studio.
Making the mistake of reading anything about it before I saw it I was struck by one particular BBC review of it what made the reviewer wonder if he was alone in not finding it funny. He talked about not being drawn into the action but feeling somewhat alone in a room full of people who were laughing, and that he felt uncomfortable for being the only guy not laughing. Indeed, I felt sort of the same way. Was it just me? How could everyone else find this funny? Why were they laughing at things they’d seen umpteen times in the trailers? Why did I spend $6 (matinee, bitches) to come and see this? Am I homophobic for not enjoying it?
I’m at a coffee shop directly outside the theater and my answer lies not in I think what I thought of the movie but what the people around me at the coffee shop seem to be talking about. And believe me, they ARE talking. This is a movie that will make people talk openly about gay issues, which is a good thing, but it’s more of a question of why it took a 6′ British comedian affecting an Austrian accent to do so. It’s a very in your face movie, much more so than Transformers 2, with its pornographic director Michael Bay at the helm, could ever wish for. Bluntly, you will never look the same way at an exercise bike after you’ve seen this movie.
As a comedy it does pretty well, but unlike Borat, you had to wonder what people were laughing at: themselves or the people on screen. Because I’d imagine not everyone in the theater inherently thought it was actually that funny. Surely the biggest kicks were from the making fun of the rednecks – and excuse me for saying this, because I am still a big fan of Baron Cohen’s work – but didn’t we see that already? Aren’t rednecks a pretty easy target? There’s an ongoing bit with a baby which raised a few laughs, but other than that it seemed like a rehash of what I’d seen before a few years back watching Borat.
Also: I highly doubt you’ll be seeing as many fan-boys quoting “Vassap!” or “How do you protect yourself against two dildos?”. I’m just sayin’. At least one frat guy walked out of the screening I was in – highly surprising considering the audience at that point in time were laughing at the blatant homophobia present in the film’s wrestling scene. But there you go. It made people think.
Where Borat had been something of a sleeper hit upon its initial release, Brüno was touted as a large marquee flick, promoted on buses and billboard all over the town, which is saying something for the power that Baron-Cohen has over the studio. One can only think that after the enormous success of Borat, they’d given Baron Cohen the keys to the kingdom, which they kind of have with this movie. Wherein the first movie had mostly been an exercise in hidden camera and crowd fooling, Brüno comes off like a series of bits; a huge deal; a big movie; and made not to be enjoyed in darkened dorm rooms and word of mouth strongholds but to enjoyed by a large group of people; to appeal to as many as possible. And this is where it falls flat. Sacha does need that core audience of people who get his brand of comedy for what it is at the end of the day: holding the mirror up not at America in general but at the people laughing at it in the first place. Where Ali G – another of Sacha’s characters – would get a huge rise out of making fun of pot smoking and the very Bro-haim attitude of the people that watched it, Brüno has none of that. It operates entirely on Hollywood steam, which is a shame, because I’d really looked forward to seeing it. There’s no mirror-holding going on, it seems to be making fun entirely of everything around it and not the very thing that made it work; laughing at itself. Which when all said and done, made Borat such a huge success. Perhaps its the whims of the characters he’s invented… where Borat would just be inquizitive and let the other people make fools of themselves, Brüno does most of the talking.
Literally steps outside the theater is a coffee shop, and in that coffee shop on Sunset Blvd in sunny Hollywood are about fifteen people who have stepped out of the movie theater to get the coffee sold at the aformentioned coffee shop. Now, I tell you this, because this is tourist season in Los Angeles. It’s predominatley people from the Midwest or elsewhere who have come to the sunny city by the sea to see some entertainment. The people outside the theater have looks of bewilderment as to what they have just seen – caught somewhere between a broad comedy and a niche indie, it hasn’t hit either. There’s a guy on his phone clearly off work from some studio who is raving about it, and not seven feet away is a young couple clad in Old Navy trying to console their clearly upset Grandma. It’s a devisive film, but where it could have been a – yes, important – important film about gay culture and the stereotypes in America and what we as a populace are thinking, it instead just comes off as too self-important to be taken seriously, much like Brüno himself. This isn’t a spoiler or anything but once you get to the part with Bono, Coldplay’s Chris Martin, and Elton John, they’re all “in” on the joke and it makes you feel that Brüno – and maybe it’s the 15 year old punk rock kid inside of me saying this – but Brüno sold out, man.
Don’t get me wrong, it has some great moments. But not enough to make it what it could have been. Unlike anything Sacha Baron Cohen has done before, I’d wait until this is on DVD. It’s just not that good, which kills me to say, because it could’ve been something much, much better.
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