Revisiting The Birdcage<\/em> in 2021\u201425 years after its release, six years after the legalization of gay marriage in the United States, a few months after the end of the infuriating Trump presidency, and a few weeks into the questionably effective Biden presidency\u2014is to realize, with a growing sense of disappointment, how much this is a movie about civility<\/em>, that loathsome word of our recent political landscape. Curse that sentiment, and the appeasement it requires! Elaine May\u2019s script is still devilishly funny, and the performances from Robin Williams and Nathan Lane are still perfectly tuned, and Mike Nichols\u2019s direction still honors the physicality of these performers and the lightness and verve they bring. And yes, you\u2019ll still hate Val. But the inherent \u201cWhen they go low, we go high\u201d messaging of The Birdcage<\/em>, which was so intentionally hopeful in the neoliberal heyday of the 1990s, doesn\u2019t slap quite so hard anymore. Williams\u2019s Armand Goldman looking around his home and realizing how many erect penises there are in his decor choices? Good stuff. Armand having to prove his humanity to his enemies, who only begrudgingly accept him because he saves them from, shudder<\/em>, journalists? Not as fun!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course, movies age. Social conventions change, and so do what we tolerate, what we expect, and we desire from our pop culture. To apply a present-day lens to The Birdcage<\/em>\u2014which itself is an adaptation of a decades-older play, 1973\u2019s La Cage aux Folles<\/em> by Jean Poires, and its 1978 film version from director \u00c9douard Molinaro\u2014is not to diminish what the Hollywood version does well. Which is a lot! The film was a box office success, bringing in nearly six times its budget of $31 million, with much of that $185-million take coming from older audiences. As John Calley, president of United Artists, told the New York Times<\/em><\/a> after the film\u2019s opening weekend atop the box office chart, The Birdcage<\/em> is \u201ccuriously about family values,\u201d with \u201ca sense of decency and honor\u201d that appealed to baby boomer moviegoers. On the critical acclaim side of things, the work of Bo Welch and Cheryl Caraski was rightfully nominated for an Academy Award for Best Production Design (that banana leaf wallpaper, all those phallic sculptures, the gigantic cross!); the film won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture; and various critics\u2019 groups and guilds nominated or awarded the performances of Williams, Lane, Hank Azaria, Gene Hackman, and Dianne Wiest. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In years since, The Birdcage<\/em> has remained adored by those who saw it contemporaneously and by new viewers who discovered it on various streaming platforms, especially after Williams\u2019s death in 2014. In a statement<\/a> to Time<\/em> magazine after Williams\u2019s suicide, Lane wrote, \u201cOne day in 1995 while riffing in the character of a snobby French toy store owner, Robin made me laugh so hard and so long that I cried. It seemed to please him to no end.\u201d Their old-married-couple dynamic remains the most gregarious, most engrossing element of The Birdcage<\/em>, and the film remains as deliriously enjoyable as it does because of the work Williams and Lane do together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Birdcage<\/em>, shot by Emmanuel Lubezki (one year after working with close friend and collaborator Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n on his adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett\u2019s A Little Princess<\/em>, and two years before they would work together again to update Charles Dickens\u2019s Great Expectations<\/em>), begins by swooping us into the colorful, vivacious world of South Beach. Lubezki flies us over the Atlantic Ocean toward a coastline that looks like a candy store, with art deco buildings painted in and illuminated by shades of aqua, citron, fuchsia, sunshine, and coral. Outside The Birdcage nightclub, a line waits to get inside to cheer on drag performers singing classics like Sister Sledge\u2019s \u201cWe Are Family\u201d; inside, club owner Armand (Williams) butts heads with Albert (Lane), his longtime partner in business and love. Albert\u2014or, Miss Albert, as he\u2019s called by the Goldmans\u2019 devoted Guatemalan houseboy Agador (an impressively fit Hank Azaria)\u2014doesn\u2019t want to go onstage as Starina. Yes, Starina is the star of The Birdcage, a triple threat comedienne, singer, and dancer who brings in worshipful audiences, even American royalty like the Kennedys. But Albert thinks Armand is hiding something from him, and he\u2019s tired of Armand dragging his heels on pulling together palimony paperwork, and he hasn\u2019t even shaved his chest yet. Won\u2019t everyone just leave him alone? <\/p>\n\n\n\n Albert is prone to histrionics, Armand is always ready with a sarcastic rejoinder, and sometimes they can\u2019t stand each other. Their first scene together is all Cat on a Hot Tin Roof<\/em> lust and bemusement, with Albert\u2019s accusatory \u201cThat sarcastic, contemptuous tone that means you know everything because you\u2019re a man and I know nothing because I\u2019m a woman,\u201d and Armand\u2019s deadpan, \u201cYou\u2019re not a woman.\u201d (Reviews weren\u2019t sure what to make of Armand\u2019s sexual preference, gender identity, and profession as a drag performer; the New York Times<\/em> referring to the character as a \u201ctransvestite\u201d in their piece<\/a> is a bit of a yikes.) But Armand and Albert\u2019s bickering doesn\u2019t diminish the deep love they have for each other, or the life they\u2019ve built together over 20 years. They\u2019re both proudly out and well-known figures in South Beach, with The Birdcage serving as a local landmark. <\/p>\n\n\n\n So when Val arrives home from college, telling Armand that he\u2019s going to marry his girlfriend of a year, Barbara Keeley (Calista Flockhart), and that her father is the Republican Ohio Sen. Kevin Keeley (Hackman), that sort of goes against everything Armand and Albert stand for. As parents, they think the couple, at Val\u2019s 20 and Barbara\u2019s 18, are too young. And as gay men, they\u2019re conflicted about what Val is asking them to do, which is pretend to be entirely different people to entertain Barbara\u2019s father and mother Louise (Wiest). Armand can\u2019t be a drag club owner; Barbara told her parents that he\u2019s a cultural attach\u00e9 to Greece. He\u2019s not with Albert, but is married to Val\u2019s mother, who is a housewife. They only live in South Beach part time. Oh, and they\u2019re not Jewish\u2014Barbara and Val decided that \u201cGoldman\u201d should be changed to \u201cColeman.\u201d Armand and Albert are cool with all that, right? <\/p>\n\n\n\n As the farce plays out, The Birdcage<\/em> hops between the two families. The Keeleys are the kind of thoroughly vapid Republicans who yell loudly about abortion, gay rights, and God, and who think that Billy Graham is less controversial than the Pope, and who really want power and respect more than anything else. They accompany Barbara to South Beach after one of their Republican colleagues dies while in bed with an underage prostitute played by pre-Boy Meets World<\/em>\u2019s Trina McGee (her \u201csassy\u201d characterization is one of the film\u2019s worst elements, playing into all kinds of problematic tropes about pop culture\u2019s sexualization of Black girls), and the Keeleys hope to manipulate Barbara\u2019s wedding to Val as rehabilitation for their own public image and fodder for Sen. Keeley\u2019s upcoming re-election bid. In South Beach, Armand struggles with Val\u2019s insistence that Albert have nothing to do with this charade they\u2019re putting on for the Keeleys, thinking that perhaps he could teach Albert to act straight and pass him off as an uncle. When that doesn\u2019t work, Armand wonders whether he can enlist Val\u2019s birth mother Katharine (Christine Baranski), who might still hold some lingering feelings for her onetime theatrical co-star and two-time lover. And while everyone keeps shoving Albert aside, he comes up with his own solution to the Keeley problem, ultimately performing a version of the mother and wife Barbara\u2019s parents expect to meet\u2014and that Albert wished he could have been. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The best scenes in The Birdcage<\/em>\u2014well, the ones that aren\u2019t<\/em> a surprisingly leggy Azaria dancing in denim cutoffs to Gloria Estefan or providing Albert with Pirin tablets\u2014allow Williams and Lane to play off each other while playing with gender roles and heteronormativity, too. Armand\u2019s explosiveness onstage when he coaches one of the club performers through an \u201ceclectic celebration of dance,\u201d cycling rapidly and exuberantly through the compressed choreography of Bob Fosse, Martha Graham, Twyla Tharp, Michael Kidd, and Madonna. Albert\u2019s dead-on impersonation of John Wayne\u2019s asymmetrical gait, and Armand\u2019s shock at how Albert captured something of the Western star that he never noticed. May\u2019s script is full of cutting asides that Williams and Lane handle with ease. And although the climactic dinner scene goes on a smidge too long, all of its emotional weight is provided by Lane\u2019s smooth drag performance as Mrs. Coleman and by Williams\u2019s mugging reactions to his partner\u2019s antics. They are lovely together, and contrast Hackman\u2019s clownish energy and Wiest\u2019s increasing suspicion quite well. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But, for all the joys The Birdcage<\/em> provides, it also abides by a central idea that was always wrong, and has only become increasingly displeasing as years have gone by: that it is the responsibility of the \u201cother\u201d to put the minds of \u201cnormal\u201d people at ease. May\u2019s script never explicitly suggests that Val requires <\/em>the Keeleys\u2019s approval to marry Barbara, but the film just assumes that the future in-laws should get along. And it also assumes that it should be the Goldmans, minding their own business in South Beach in a community where they are respected and beloved, who hide or change how they live, rather than the Keeleys, the patriarch of whom is a prominent politician actively pursuing policies that hurt countless people, including those who could soon be his family. <\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/birdcage2-1024x659.jpg\")
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