This review first appeared in The Colorado Springs Gazette. To read this review at its original source, click here.

How you felt about Borat will largely determine how you feel about Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest punk’d fiction/documentary hybrid, Bruno. That the films are essentially identical in substance makes the comparison relevant. This film is not as good as that one, though the end result is virtually the same — revulsion and laughter become nearly indistinguishable. The reason Bruno doesn’t rise to the level of Cohen’s earlier work — besides the inevitable diminished returns of revisiting now familiar territory — is that this time around the film is more interested in making fun than in making a point.

Bruno follows much the same “plot” as Borat: a flamboyant foreigner comes to America seeking fame and fortune. In this case Cohen plays Bruno, a disgraced, gay, Austrian fashionista who hopes to reinvent himself and make it big in Hollywood. Along the path to stardom, Bruno engages in a series of ever more calamitous misadventures, some real and some fake. The film comments on everything from the cult of celebrity to homophobia. These disparate slices are then stitched together into a less than perfect narrative. Some parts feel like footage that probably should have been left on the cutting room floor but made its way into the film because no other connective tissue could be found. Perhaps for this reason, Bruno blurs the line between truth and fiction even more than Borat, relying far more on its artificial elements than in its prearranged interactions, thus losing a lot of the bracing authenticity that made the first film so invigorating.

The ability to laugh at ourselves is essential. But Cohen wants the laughter to catch, and in some cases to die, in our throats. If it doesn’t, we may be just as culpable as his victims. No one ever sees Cohen coming, which is half the fun. Surely Cohen’s victims must question their situation at some point. But by then it is too late and they are committed. They would rather power through — even if it makes them look like fools, or worse, refractions of monstrosity — than admit to being gullible. I feel bad for none of them. Cohen gives them lots of rope to hang themselves with and even provides the scaffolding. But they tie the noose and place it around their own necks.

Sure, for the most part Cohen goes after the low hanging fruit. The easy targets are generally the most stereotypical, the most broad, and hence the easiest to laugh at. The more sophisticated targets may be just as reprehensible but they have simply learned to camouflage their prejudices better. Cohen’s outlandishness nearly always provokes a response. Some of his victims are not rotten (though almost all are, to some degree, frauds) so much as simply gobsmacked by his bizarre behavior. How Cohen manages to stay in one piece, segment after segment, is beyond me. Some Americans may be tempted to wish Cohen would go pick on someone else for a change, which he does. Sort of. Bruno moves briefly to the Middle East at one point, showing that naivety and mean spiritedness are no respecters of borders.

Cohen jealously guards his real self with the same ferocity with which his prostitutes his avatars. His characters are willing to do and say just about anything; he is not. Cohen, who has little to no shame, is a vulgar mirror, reflecting an inconsistent, contradictory and fractured America. His point is to make you feel deeply uncomfortable even as tears of laughter roll down your cheeks. Much of Bruno’s power comes from shattering taboos and crossing the line of what is acceptable with deliberate abandon. While quite funny, the laughs, built around shockingly offensive material, aren’t nearly as consistent as in his previous efforts. Perchance because what powers them is more an attempt to shock and amuse and less an attempt to illuminate. There’s no denying the film is pervasively funny, but the jokes are lean, starved of deeper meaning.

Philosophically speaking, Bruno stumbles along drunkenly, lacking the tight, narrow focus of its predecessor. Perhaps it doesn’t work as well this time because Cohen hoists himself once too often on his own petard, feeding off of the very celebrity he exposes as shallow and vacuous. As a friend said of the film, “it goes deep into the surface.”

Bruno has the same bark as Borat but sadly, not the same bite.

© Copyright 2009 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.