Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
The Birdcage opened on March 8, 1996. That was before Will & Grace, before Queer As Folk, before Boys Don’t Cry, before Milk, before The Kids Are All Right, before Transparent. If you view every piece of gay entertainment as a brick in the road towards where we are today — a road very much still under construction — The Birdcage happened several miles back. And that doesn’t even begin to deal with what’s happened in politics since 1996. It’s been a massively progressive 20 years, and by all rights, those two decades should have left a film like The Birdcage in the dusts of history. Only it hasn’t. The Birdcage, while dated by history and politics, is just as sparkling a piece of comedy as it was when it premiered. It’s kind of miraculous.
On paper, The Birdcage is just a pile of elements we’d leap to call “problematic” today. Central couple Armand (Robin Williams) and Albert (Nathan Lane) are the owner and star of a drag club? Appropriating drag culture. Robin Williams? A straight man playing a gay character. Armand and Albert’s relationship? Regressively conforming to gendered roles. Albert’s screaming femininity? Played for laughs and borderline misogynistic. Hank Azaria’s character? Dios mio, where to begin?
So how does The Birdcage get away with it? And now just get away with it but come out the other side as an improbable celebration of gay comedy? It comes down to a few elements.
It’s Farce Done Right
You can forgive a lot if it’s funny, and if there’s anything to forgive in The Birdcage, it’s obviated by its strong story and joke structure, all of which can be attributed to the writer/director duo of Elaine May and Mike Nichols, who maybe know a few things about staging a successful comedy. By the time the movie reaches it’s dinner party (because it has to be a dinner party), things have already spun so out of control for the Goldman/Colemans that Albert showing up in what can only be described as Barbara Bush drag is only one of their problems.
It Is Impeccably Crafted
The talent behind the camera in this movie is honestly insane. You’d expect a movie featuring drag queens to have a top-notch costume designer, so the presence of Ann Roth — who the same year as The Birdcage would go on to win an Oscar for her work on The English Patient — is no surprise. Slightly more surprising? The director of photography is Emmanuel Lubezki, he who just won his third consecutive Best Cinematography Oscar. It’s rare to see top-notch cinematographers working in comedy; you don’t usually think about visual style in those movies. But in The Birdcage everything from the sunset pastel color patterns to the attempted formalities of the dinner scene feel remarkably composed. Of course it’s Lubezki. Of course it is.
Nathan Lane’s Albert Is Sympathetic But Never a Figure of Pity
I think this is an important one. Even while Albert is being treated poorly and with shame by Armand and their son Val (Dan Futterman), Lane never allows Albert to be pitied. He remains prickly and dramatic and impossible, and as a result, his and Armand’s relationship feels real. There’s a sense of their years together and the working relationship they’ve built. When you factor in Hank Azaria’s houseboy, Agador, there’s even a sense of family, or at least family-as-cabaret. Writing Albert as a pathetic figure to feel sorry for would have ultimately weighted the film down with condescension. By continuing to laugh with, and even at, Albert, we’re in it with him.
The Themes of Performative Identity Are Actually Pretty Sophisticated
If there’s a message behind the madness, it’s ultimately not that Albert’s femininity is to be shamed and ridiculed, it’s that the hoops we jump through and the identities we costume ourselves in can be silly, but they’re also pretty universal. The fact that the Keeleys (Gene Hackman and Dianne Wiest, doing stellar work) have to make their exit while costumed as drag queens themselves is a striking visual metaphor, but it’s really in keeping with the film’s ultimate message: we all have to perform who we are every day. Senator Keeley needs to keep up family-values appearances to get votes. Mrs. Keeley feels devalued by the role in her family she’s chosen to play.
Life truly is a farce, and we’re all tap-dancing our way through it, and with that as the ultimate message of the film — rather than some didactic lesson about tolerance that would have quickly become outdated as politics progressed — The Birdcage has managed to remain proudly, defiantly entertaining 20 years later.
