Evidently, Sacha Baron Cohen doesn't mind if he gets killed cracking us up. Because he's not just making us laugh, he's making a point. And he's using cultural TNT to do it.
In "Brüno," Cohen's latest atomic provocation in which he plays a gay Austrian fashionista, the daredevil comic deploys far more dangerous guerrilla tactics to shock than he did in the somewhat funnier and, by comparison, infinitely tamer "Borat." (Frequently the new film goes way beyond the infamous nude wrestling scene in "Borat," if that tells you anything, and it should.)
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With exaggerated swish and a musical Austrian accent that's curled with a lisp, Cohen riles a Lebanese terrorist who grimly throws him out of his office. He enrages a trio of Alabama game hunters, one of whom finally beats the camera away. He incites violence in a crowd of bloodthirsty, homophobic cage-fighting fans in Arkansas.
Using Cohen's clever tactics and verbal facility, this isn't hard to do. It requires wits, for sure, but it takes a great comedian's unbridled hubris and an immunity to shame to pull off his outrages.
Cohen employs irony as a bludgeon. He's the king of entrapment. But in "Brüno" he sticks largely to infuriating people by acting extremely gay around them, often making passes so strong and crass that you can't blame the victims for their hotheaded responses, such as when U.S. Rep. Ron Paul storms out of a hotel room after Brüno tries to make a surreptitious sex tape with him.
He finds easy targets to manipulate — a "gay converter," an oily psychic, ethics-challenged stage parents — and even easier targets to make angry — Army drill sergeants, the Southern hunters. He pushes and pushes, by turns trying to make his victims squirm and make them punch him in the face (amazingly, that never happens). He needles them, sussing out their prejudices and stupidities, until they're flat against the wall and finally explode or just look ludicrous and/or moronic.
As Brüno, skinny and shorn of body hair, Cohen comes across as a "Candid Camera" prankster with a transgressive agenda and a pervert's hormonal surge. But as much as Cohen is exposing the hypocrisy and inanity of homophobia and bigotry, he's dishing up a lacerating critique of celebrity culture and what it does to us.
The movie begins with Brüno being canned from his fashion television show in Austria after a semi-funny mishap with an all-Velcro suit. He then decides to head to Los Angeles to become the "biggest Austrian superstar since Hitler" and the "biggest gay movie star since Schwarzenegger."
To achieve celebrity — his crude raison d'ê tre — he travels across the country and the world, trawling victims for a scorched-earth comedy tour. The various set-ups amount to wicked drive-bys of the unsuspecting, from Paula Abdul, who can't believe Brüno has employed Mexican laborers to literally act as furniture, to a pair of public relations consultants who are as articulate as tree bark. You watch agape at the things Cohen will try, and you stagger at what he gets away with. You can't always tell who's in on the joke or if the subject is really being blindsided by Brüno's astonishing boneheadedness. Like Borat, he plays the ignorant naif-bumpkin, clueless to the bounds of propriety.
At the end of the day, behind Cohen's bare-tush shaking and high-pitched giggle, "Brüno" effectively detonates sexual and racial stereotypes by amping them up and sticking them under peoples' noses. The whiff is both fetid and liberating.
It's social comedy at its meanest and dirtiest. Yet, amid the X-rated farce and brash burlesque lulls a lyrical, if ludicrous, hymn to tolerance.
