The Birdcage (1996)

I remember thinking that Dan Futterman was quite attractive in this film as the young "Val", but boy does his turn out to be one of the most selfish and thoughtless of characters! He turns up at the eponymous nightclub run by his father "Armand" (Robin Williams) and his consort of twenty years "Albert" (Nathan Lane) to announce he is to wed. Thing is, he is going to marry the daughter of the rather puritanical senator "Keeley" (Gene Hackman) and so they are going to have to play happy, heterosexual, families when the prospective in-laws come to visit. "Armand" manages his disappointment rather better than his lover who, inclined to the histrionic at the best of times, takes it as all as a personal slight and a mega-strop ensues. Meantime, the worthy senator gets some shocking news of his own involving a colleague and a hooker! Suddenly he needs to get away, and so to the "Birdcage" he, wife "Louise" (Dianne Wiest) and intended bride "Barbara" (Calista Flockhart) duly head. The press get wind of this, and of the fact that it's a fairly ostentatious gay club - and so are just praying to get some snaps of this visit. Can the family stay on a even keel long enough for the estranged mother "Katherine" (Christine Baranski) to arrive, and can they manage to avoid implicating the holier-than-thou politician in the mother of all scandals? Time hasn't been especially kind to this, but Williams and an excellently hammy Nathan Lane do well keeping the momentum going as we to and fro with tantrums a-plenty. Weist and Hackman work well too, but the starring role has to belong to Hank Azaria's camp "Agador" who takes crop-tops to an whole new level. Jean Pouret's original play was written with it's tongue in it's cheek and this updates, but essentially carries on, the tradition of light farce. Stereoptypes galore? Yep, but they're still fun performances that are worth a watch.

The Birdcage (1996) (rewatch)

Directed by Mike Nichols

Mike Nichols' The Birdcage is the American remake of La Cage aux Folles, with Robin Williams and Nathan Lane as a gay couple running a drag club in South Beach. When Williams' son brings home his fiancée whose parents happen to be ultra-conservative politicians (Gene Hackman and Dianne Wiest), the setup becomes a classic farce: can this flamboyant household pass for "normal" long enough to survive one dinner?

Williams and Lane absolutely kick it. Both are tremendous actors and comedians, and both turn in top performances here. Williams plays the relative straight man, grounded and capable, while Lane unleashes controlled chaos as Albert, the club's star performer who can't quite hide his true self no matter how hard he tries. Their chemistry is genuine; beneath all the comedy is a portrait of a long-term partnership built on real love and affection. This is Mike Nichols at the height of his powers as both stage and film director in the '90s, and The Birdcage is his prize, a perfectly calibrated comedy that never sacrifices humanity for laughs.

This is one of the early gay films that treats its characters with affection rather than as punchlines. Yes, there's comedy in Albert's dramatics and the elaborate charade everyone must maintain, but the joke is never on their queerness; it's on hypocrisy, on the absurdity of having to hide, on conservative politicians who preach family values while embodying none. Hank Azaria's Agador adds another layer of inspired lunacy as the housekeeper who can't quite master "masculine" domesticity.

It's funny, or perhaps very sad, how the politics in this film haven't aged. The right-wing moral panic, the performance of traditional values by people who traffic in cruelty, the idea that certain families are acceptable and others must hide to survive—we're still fighting these battles nearly three decades later. What was satire then feels like documentary now.

But The Birdcage endures because humor and humanity are so important, especially when they're deployed together. Nichols understood that comedy can be generous, that laughter doesn't require cruelty, that the best farce reveals truth while making us smile. Williams and Lane deliver performances that are both hilarious and heartfelt, reminding us why both were masters of their craft.

This one holds up beautifully.