In the most uproarious sequence of the often very funny social farce The Birdcage, a South Beach, Fla., drag-show bar owner named Armond (played by Robin Williams) tries to instruct his partner Albert (Nathan Lane) on the finer points of acting like a heterosexual man. Armond shows Albert how to smear mustard on his bread, how to walk like John Wayne, and how to speak in a deep, determined voice. Albert struggles to keep his pinky down and his diva posturings small, but it’s no use. He can’t win; he’s hopelessly fabulous.
The longer the routine goes on, the funnier and the more poignant it becomes. The twosome are practicing their manliness for a reason—Armond’s son (from a one-night stand 20 years ago) is preparing to marry the daughter of a prominent conservative senator, and he needs his two dads to play it straight for the duration of one dinner party. It doesn’t seem like too much to ask, until you see Williams and Lane aggressively try to pinpoint and suppress exactly what makes them offensive to “normal” Americans. The more they flail, the more we laugh—the better to choke back the injustice and lunacy of it all.
The Birdcage is based on La Cage Aux Folles, one of the most popular French films of all time and the inspiration for two sequels and a Broadway musical. This fully Americanized adaptation was written by Elaine May and directed by Mike Nichols, two of Hollywood’s most sporadic auteurs. As filmmakers, they’ve been responsible in equal measure for sparkling cinema (The Graduate, The Heartbreak Kid) and utter hackwork (Regarding Henry, Ishtar). But as a comedy team in the early 1960s, Nichols and May made their reputations with a series of innovative comedy sketches that played off the polite tensions and linguistic quirks of modern relationships. It’s this gift that they bring to The Birdcage, a film peppered with verbal wit and pithy throwaway dialogue.
For Nichols’ part, he backs up May’s words with pointed images—spoofing the bizarre things that we accept as normal, he pans his camera past scantily clad women on South Beach and anatomy-obsessed exercise books. (The Big Book of Butts and Thighs rests in one public waiting room.) He plays up the neon-soaked colors of the beach community, contrasting them strikingly with the chilly skies of Washington, D.C., and the drab gray of Armond and Albert’s apartment after they make it “safe” for their dinner guests. With its vigorous attention to detail, The Birdcage is Nichols’ best-observed film since Postcards From the Edge—which was itself his best-observed film since The Graduate.
Nathan Lane, who has become one of Broadway’s best-loved stars of the past decade, vamps uninhibitedly through the role of Albert (stage name: Starina!). He’s a delight, but it would have been nice to see a little more of his musical performances: The movie cuts away just as he takes the stage. (A full Stephen Sondheim number was reportedly cut from the picture, to make it move faster.) Without the spark of Starina’s stagecraft, Albert beomes a bit too one-dimensional, too flighty.
All of which tilts the balance of the film toward Robin Williams, who gives his most vivid performance to date. As an actor, Williams has two unfortunate tendencies: When he’s asked to play wacky, he improvises so wildly that he loses his character, and when he plays it straight he can be unbearably drippy. In The Birdcage, Williams manages to suppress his undisciplined side (save for one incongruous, awkward dance-coach scene) and find an intense, lively center to his Armond. He plays the club owner as a confident, decent, righteous man, more than a little tired of being forced to play shell games with his identity.
Across the dinner table from Williams and Lane are the conservative senator and his wife, played with gentle good humor by Gene Hackman and Dianne Wiest. The right-wingers in The Birdcage are not really bad people; rather, like many Americans, they just want to be on the right side and know the right thing to say. They’re distrustful of lifestyles that stand in opposition to their own, and they hide their fear behind their own confining postures—raising religious and political objections, and blaming the outsiders for actively trying to undermine their way of life. (Which reminds me of playwright Paul Rudnick’s great line about gay politics: “I’d like to join you for lunch, but first I have to check my homosexual agenda.”)
The Birdcage’s biggest flaw is that, once these disparate factions meet, the farce doesn’t escalate to quite the insane heights that one might expect. With the exception of Hank Azaria’s gutsy turn as a flaming Guatemalan houseboy, the movie feels a little tentative, as though Nichols, May, and their players were afraid to push the outrageousness.
But there’s a reason for this. What The Birdcage loses in unfettered gaiety, it gains in steely anger. It’s there in the seething center of Robin Williams’ performance, and it’s there in the arid space that Nichols creates when he strips away all of Armond and Albert’s lifestyle accoutrements. Somewhere in the 15 years that it’s taken Nichols and May to bring this project to fruition, The Birdcage became less about zaniness and more about bitterness.
As a result, The Birdcage is as heartbreakingly touching as it is funny, and that is its greatest success. When Armond’s son tells his father that he is an embarrassment, it stings everyone in the audience who has ever been told, by a loved one or by society, “You are not welcome here.” Hopefully, it will also sting the people who have done the telling. Only then, perhaps, as the moving finale of this film suggests, can we all put away our poses, step out of our cages and dance on the same floor, together.
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