A Gay Ole Time

The hero of “Brüno” comes all the way from Austria, where the phrase “tone it down” apparently isn’t too popular. You’d think a gay guy who’s this flamboyant would be hard to take seriously, but that’s why a mocumentary like this one works – although its star, Sacha Baron Cohen, is playing a cosmic prank on ordinary, unsuspecting people all over the world, some of the biggest laughs here come from Cohen’s victims, who get pushed to impossible limits and still don’t catch on. That’s either saying a lot for Cohen or not a lot for the world.

Brüno isn’t really all that different from Borat, the character that turned Cohen into a movie star almost immediately in 2006. He was the clueless immigrant who came from Kazakhstan to America with a live chicken in his suitcase, only to have it escape at the most inappropriate time. (He was riding on the subway in New York City.) Pranks like these were so extreme that they make you wonder how Cohen pulled them off without getting himself arrested, which is the same hardcore spirit that he brings to “Brüno” – even when he’s in over his head, he uses his panic for laughs.

The film follows Brüno’s mission to become a celebrity, and the way he always attracts the wrong kind of attention. When he travels to Los Angeles to find stardom, he’s chagrined to learn that no one knows what to make of him, and that he easily offends a great deal of the people there. He even manages to irritate people who have yet to meet him: When he develops a pilot for a TV series devoted to eccentric fashion and ridiculous interviews, he and his agent have it screened for a test audience, only to hear that everybody was disgusted by it. On the survey, one of them wrote that “it was worse than cancer.”

So Brüno leaves America to find fame elsewhere, namely the Middle East, where he asks an alleged terrorist to make him famous by kidnapping him. As a bonus, he tries to bring peace between the Jews and the Palestinians by sitting them at the same table and getting them to join in on a charity-style pop song. He even ups the ante with some dance moves.

When that doesn’t work, he goes back to America, where he tries to reinvent himself as a straight guy after concluding that most people in Hollywood aren’t gay. (Tom Cruise and John Travolta are two of the names that turn up.) He heads to the Midwest to congregate with straight people, and even manages to work his way into the Army. Not surprisingly, the ruse isn’t very convincing – he gives himself away by adding accessories to his Army uniform, including a designer scarf.

You might think that mentioning details like these would spoil the movie, but all of this is just the tip of the iceberg. Cohen’s naïve victims make for some of the biggest laughs, including Paula Abdul and Rep. Ron Paul, a conservative Republican who Brüno thinks would make an ideal co-star in his celebrity sex tape.

Everyone here is a victim, but Cohen does only half of the damage. People as gullible as this are a prankster’s dream, and they can share the blame for letting themselves fall for the joke. After the success of “Borat,” the world should know better – those who cannot remember Cohen’s past films are condemned to appear in one.