We just returned from Bruno, and I don’t have a review per se, but I do feel compelled to get my first reactions down.

[UPDATE: Always good to re-read one's work to look for, um, gaps. Yes, we liked it very much. If you liked Borat, and don't mind the fact that Cohen will surely do a few things you find offensive, I recommend it. It's obviously not for everyone, but we laughed throughout.]

Most of the reviews I’ve scanned have been negative, and have made the same couple of critiques:

  • It’s an excuse for liberals to be allowed to make fun of homosexuals;
  • It’s pretty much the same as Borat.

[Warning: Spoilers follow the jump...]

I hate claiming that a negative reviewer “just didn’t get” a movie that I liked; Sacha Baron Cohen’s work is such a Rorschach that who could claim to know what exactly was “intended”? So I won’t make that claim about A. O. Scott’s review for the New York Times. But we disagree on what the point was supposed to be, which parts were funny or not, what felt lazy or forced. Scott says that a goofy, bizarre portrayal of Borat and his partner are supposed to make us think gay sex is weird, which makes me wonder if he ever saw Austin Powers or The Forty-Year-Old Virgin. Rather, I think the scene to which he refers puts homosexuality in exactly the same position that heterosexuals are in on the screen.

While the narrative is basically the same as Borat, I actually felt that it was more effective here. The narrative isn’t the point anyway; it’s an excuse for allowing the next string of encounters. To critique the storyline is like whining about the dialogue in Transformers or G.I. Joe: true, maybe, but beside the point for the intended audience

Bruno is also, most surprisingly, a little more complex than you’d think. What it seemed to show, for all its examples of intolerant rednecks and rubes, was that there were a lot of people who were more tolerant than we might have a right to expect. Two cases in point (assuming for the moment that they weren’t staged, which I haven’t looked into yet):

  • Bruno goes camping with a trio of hunters in Alabama, and I thought they came off as guys who were trying their best to be tolerant of the guy, even as he provoked them quite a bit. Dana Stevens and I apparently saw this scene differently.
  • Bruno goes to a the home of a terrorist leader in the Middle East, and says Osama bin Laden looks like “a dirty wizard” or “a homeless Santa” and while he’s told to leave, he lives to tell the tale.

In her review, Betsy Sharkey of the L.A. Times asks a great question:

And does the outrage from a largely black audience to the O.J. baby on a Dallas talk show speak to their stupidity, as the film suggests, or is Baron Cohen being punked by a group that understands its role as part of this absurdist theater better than he does?

A similar question nagged at me as I was leaving the theater. Who’s in on the jokes and who isn’t? Do we care? Is it still satire if half of them are just playing at satire? When Elton John sings, in a collaboration with Bruno, Bono, Snoop Dogg and Sting, about making the world safe for “bleached assholes,” one has to wonder when “gotcha” satire and self-parody just become a pair of mirrors reflecting endlessly into a horizon. The scene reminded me of the Eminem incident at the MTV Awards, and the speculation that the notorious homophobe was somehow okay with Sacha Baron Cohen’s junk in his face on national television. Is it more important to show you’re a good sport than to re-declare your prejudice? Is it responsible to give people known for their prejudices opportunities to show they’re good sports?

Good lord, this has turned into a sort of review. I’ll close by saying I felt bad for Ron Paul and the guys who took him camping, and the parents who were apparently desperate enough to let their children be photographed in horrific circumstances, but I can’t think of anyone else.