Probably right

Bruno review: The Current Cinema: The New Yorker

My favourite movie reviewer Anthony Lane has written about Bruno. While I have no interest in seeing it, I strongly suspect Lane is on the money.

I note in particular that he now agrees completely with what Christopher Hitchens said about Borat, namely that Baron Cohen's humour actually misfires in that his American targets come out of it as showing remarkable good manners in the face of attempted humiliation. Here's Lane:

I realized, watching “Borat” again, that what it exposed was not a vacuity in American manners but, more often than not, a tolerance unimaginable elsewhere. Borat’s Southern hostess didn’t shriek when he appeared with a bag of feces; she sympathized, and gently showed him what to do, and the same thing happens in “Brüno,” when a martial-arts instructor, confronted by a foreigner with two dildos, doesn’t flinch. He teaches Brüno some defensive moves, then adds, “This is totally different from anything I’ve ever done.” Ditto the Hollywood psychic—another risky target, eh?—who watches Brüno mime an act of air-fellatio and says, after completion, “Well, good luck with your life.” In both cases, I feel that the patsy, though gulled, comes off better than the gag man; the joke is on Baron Cohen, for foisting indecency on the decent. The joker is trumped by the square.

Hence, I have no interest in Baron Cohen's style of comedy.

Also, I strongly suspect that Lane is correct on the question of whether the film hurts or harms gays as a group:

....I’m afraid that “Brüno” feels hopelessly complicit in the prejudices that it presumes to deride. You can’t honestly defend your principled lampooning of homophobia when nine out of every ten images that you project onscreen comply with the most threadbare cartoons of gay behavior. A schoolboy who watches a pirated DVD of this film will look at the prancing Austrian and find more, not fewer, reasons to beat up the kid on the playground who doesn’t like girls. There is, on the evidence of this movie, no such thing as gay love; there is only gay sex, a superheated substitute for love, with its own code of vulcanized calisthenics whose aim is not so much to sate the participants as to embarrass onlookers from the straight—and therefore straitlaced—society beyond.

Mind you, I also agree with the point made by Piers Akerman that it's a bit rich for gays who support the Sydney Mardi Gras and the image that it promotes to complain about Bruno showing a stereotype.

It's a pity the media sucks up Baron Cohen's "talent" for self promotion with such gusto. But then, I suppose reality TV has shown the public's current unfortunate appetite for humiliation as entertainment.