What a difference an umlaut makes.
While Brüno was the No. 1 movie this weekend, according to the New York Times, its actual earnings weren't all that. Ticket sales have added up to an estimated $30.4 million versus Borat's $26.5 million opening in 2006. But Brüno opened in a few thousand more theaters, and its comparative per screen average of $11,040 is well short of Borat's $31,607.
(Time magazine thinks it's Twitter's fault. Now there's an angle!)
Sacha Baron Cohen was the flavor of the year when Borat came out. This was comedy tailormade for all the hip, knowing young subversives and ironistes raised on a diet of The Daily Show, Jackass and the US version of The Office. I was struck by how anxiously critics and cultural commentators jumped on the Borat bandwagon—even the fogeys on NPR were gushing, as if hoping to score points with a younger demo and say, "We're cool! We get it!"
I thought Americans were missing the anti-Americanism of SBC's humor and getting off on their own superiority—sort of, "Hey, it's those Americans he's taking the piss out of; I'm not one of those Americans so it's fine .... and it's hilarious!" If you didn't love it, then you didn't get it—which meant, well, if you were a critic or cultural commentator, you'd passed your sell-by date and would probably lose your job.
I've never been a huge fan of Sacha Baron Cohen. I always sensed a certain hubris about this guy, from Ali G on down. Borat made me laugh, a lot—SBC has a sublime gift for mimicry and physical comedy—but I also thought his targets were too easy. So America is full of Ugly Americans, tell us something we don't know! And I don't care if Cohen is Jewish—the scenes in the B&B run by the kindly older couple, with Borat carrying on about "shape-shifting Jews" and throwing money at cockroaches, pushed it way too far. (Even though the couple whom SBC tricked into filming those scenes, the Behars, are heroically magnanimous about what happened and are big SBC fans now.) But between the jumbo-sized censor bar dancing below Borat's groin during the infamous wrestling scene, Borat posing in that banana hammock in Cannes, and Brüno's junk-hugging outfits, I also think SBC is just a little bit too infatuated with his own footlong. So you're a big guy there, Sacha. Lucky Isla. Congratch!
So I've been fascinated by how many critics have done a dizzying about-face on SBC and his humor now. On Rotten Tomatoes, Borat scored 97 percent from the "top critics" on the Tomatometer. Brüno scored a relatively meagre 69 percent. Take a look at the contrasts.
In Manohla Dargis's Borat review in the NYT, she likens "Mr. Baron Cohen" to "the 19th-century German thinker August Bebel" and glowingly declares that "the brilliance of Borat is that its comedy is as pitiless as its social satire, and as brainy" and that "just when you’re ready to cry, you howl."
Her fellow critic AO Scott, however, calls Brüno "a lazy piece of work that panders more than it provokes" and harumphs, "It’s not all that hard to find people in America who will expose their fear, ignorance and hatred on camera, as anyone with access to YouTube during the last presidential election knows. Derision, though, is not the same as insight, and 'Will you look at those dumb rednecks' is not much of a punch line."
Let's see what the New Yorker's Anthony Lane has to say. In his Borat review he reverently ponders the cultural and intellectual method behind SBC's madness: "...it is as if he were outraged by the business of our being human—as if, in laying bare our follies, he were just quickening the process by which we already make fools of ourselves." And yet, for Brüno, he has grown weary. "Its main target area, as before, is the United States, or, as Baron Cohen sees it, a vast barrel writhing with shootable fish. Forget satire; this guy doesn’t want to scorch the earth anymore. He just wants to swing his dick."
While New York magazine did a whole zeitgeisty feature on Borat and the new "squirm comedy" called So Funny It Hurts, their Brüno piece is called Mincing Minstrelsy and poses the question, Are we laughing with Brüno or at him? (They're asking now?)
Stephanie Zacharek in Salon was somewhat tentative about Borat, but she had high praise for SBC, conceding that it was "an astonishingly entertaining picture, and it's a testament to Cohen's gifts that he can pull off a feat as extravagant and as fully realized as this one is." However, she ditches the gloves for Brüno: "Cohen's methods and aims are more scattershot, and his shtick is more stock: Setting out to "prove" how dumb Midwesterners are doesn't qualify as great satire. It's really just superiority."
You don't say.
There's one more thing I need to say about Sacha Baron Cohen. His shtick isn't even original. Way back in the 70s, the Australian comedian Garry McDonald created a character called Norman Gunston, a nervous, sweaty, bumbling Hollywood correspondent with permanent shaving nicks on his face who routinely ambushed celebrities with painfully inane questions. For better or worse, he was a national hero. I think SBC owes royalties to this guy.
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