A Life Through Film #016: The Birdcage
As America grapples with the future of gay rights, a big hit makes the case for acceptance
Release Date: 3/8/1996
Weeks at Number One: 1
Thanks for reading! This is my ongoing series where I track the evolution of American culture in my life by reviewing every number one film at the weekend box office since I was born in chronological order. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading my introduction post here, and be sure to like and share the review if you enjoyed it!
Let’s loop back to the origins of this column a bit.
The first movie ever covered in “A Life In Film,” To Wong Foo: Thanks For Everything! Julie Newmar, was about as perfect a jumping off point as I could have asked for, given the big thesis of this series. A movie I had never seen with a fun premise and a connection to the greater American culture around it allowed me to really stretch those research and critique skills right out of the gate, especially before more familiar and thematically complicated works like Se7en began to rear their heads.
By this point in “A Life in Film,” we’ve jumped from September of 1995 to March of ‘96, so things are still very similar, culturally. Given that the subject matter of this week’s column is related to To Wong Foo, I thought this would serve as a good opportunity to expand on some things I wrote about in that first column many months ago, because I worry I painted a bit too rosy a picture.
Despite the trend of drag queens in the mainstream as a novelty and a thriving indie film movement, the 1990s were not an amazing climate for many gay Americans. Though the AIDS crisis of the previous decade was finally slowing down its deadly rampage (1996 marked the first year since the epidemic began that the infection rate declined), the generational losses suffered by the LGBT+ community permanently altered the trajectory of gay rights. Over 100,000 people died from AIDS in the 1980s, making it the leading cause of death in young adults that decade.
Many of those who died were gay men in long term relationships that resembled marriage in every way except legal status. Many grieving partners were left with no rights to life insurance payouts, inheritances, or even just the recognition of widower status. Amid all this grief, the conversation around what was next for the community shifted to the solutions. At the same time that drag was becoming an acceptable mainstream curiosity, the first major push for gay marriage in the America had begun.
This fight would be an uphill battle for decades. Gallup polls show that the average American was far more adverse to the idea of gay marriage in 1996 compared to today. In the media and government, a post-Reagan crop of Republican commentators and politicians were openly hostile towards the idea of gay marriage on grounds of Christian doctrine. And the other side of the aisle wasn’t much more accepting; just before the spring of ‘96, President Clinton had signed Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell into law, forcing any non-straight member of the military deep into the closet and enforcing a code of straight paranoia in the armed forces.
Still, there was reason to hope in March of 1996. The Hawaiian Supreme Court was about to make a ruling that could make the Aloha State the first in the Union to legalize gay marriage. As conservative state legislatures panicked and began passing laws to ensure that any legal union between two men (or women) would be annulled in their borders, Americans at large began to consider a world where LGBT+ relationships could be as legally protected as heterosexual ones.
While this was happening, the latest movie from one of the era’s biggest stars had just hit theaters, and it was ready to make a case for gay marriage in the face of moral conservatism.
The Birdcage is a 1996 comedy starring Robin Williams as well as Nathan Lane, Gene Hackman, and Dianne Wiest, and directed by Mike Nichols. The story follows the hijinks that ensue when the straight male son of a Miami club owner (Williams) and his longtime drag queen partner (Lane) invites the parents of his fiancée, an ultraconservative politician (Hackman) and his uptight wife (Wiest) to dinner.
The script for The Birdcage, written by longtime Nichols collaborator Elaine May, is an adaptation of La Cage aux Folles, a French play from 1972 written by Jean Poiret. The 1996 American film carries over almost all of the major plot points from this original play and its first film adaptation, a Franco-Italian coproduction from 1978. That version of La Cage aux Folles was a big hit overseas and a surprise success here in the States as well. At the time, it was the highest grossing foreign film of all time, and when you factor in inflation it still nearly cracks the top 10. A few Oscar nominations means reflects a critical success to match. [Watched it for this review. It hasn’t aged amazingly, but I liked it! 3/5]
Nichols, a successful director of both theater and film for years (he’s directed many a comedy, but his most iconic film is still 1967’s The Graduate [4/5]) was one of the many, many fans of La Cage aux Folles. He once said that it had the most perfect structure of any comedy. Nichols was actually attached to direct the play’s initial Broadway run in ‘80s before leaving the project after getting into a kerfuffle with one of the show’s producers.
A decade later, Nichols wasn’t in the hottest moment of his film career, but he still commanded plenty of respect. When president of United Artists John Calley mentioned to him that the studio held partial film rights to La Cage aux Folles, the director enthusiastically convinced him to acquire the rest of the rights. Nichols had a vision of adapting the original story to lampoon the modern American moral crusaders: Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Pat Buchanan, et cetera.
But the director had an urgency to this project. As Calley remembers it, Nichols told him:
By the time the movie comes out, you won’t be able to parody [social conservatives] anymore - they’ll be parodying themselves.
Once the film rights were secured, Nichols enlisted old friend Elaine May for the adaptation. Despite the decades between the French play and American adaptation, the list of major differences between La Cage aux Folles and The Birdcage is actually pretty short. The shifted focus to making fun of contemporary Republicans made the story more topical to the moment, while the setting shift from the South of France to South Beach in Miami came after a trip Nichols took to the area while researching drag shows, giving the movie a connection to a well known gay hot spot.
The director’s original idea was to cast Robin Williams and Steve Martin as the leads: Williams as Albert, the more effeminate drag queen performer of the pair, Martin as Armand, his partner, the straight laced manager of the Birdcage night club. However, Martin felt he couldn’t bring the right energy to the role, and Williams was hesitant to do another character in drag so soon after Mrs. Doubtfire [3.5/5]. Unphased, Nichols pivoted: Williams would instead be the more dignified Armand, and for Albert, the director found exactly who he needed on Broadway.
It wouldn’t be correct to say that The Birdcage was Nathan Lane’s first big movie. In 1994, the career theater standout had voiced Timon in The Lion King, a crucial role in one of the most important movies of the Disney Renaissance [I only watched The Lion King for the first time as an adult a few years ago and can confirm that you don’t just like it because of nostalgia. 4/5]. But Lane’s world was still firmly live theater; when Nichols first approached the actor about playing Albert, Lane had to decline despite his interest in the part. After all, he was about to star in a production of A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum on Broadway. He couldn’t just leave to star in a major motion picture with one of the biggest stars of the time!
Nichols was crafty though. It had been a few years, but he still had pull in the theater world. He called his friend, Scott Rudin, the producer of that A Funny Thing Happened production, and explained the situation. Rudin managed to push the start date for the show a full year so that Lane could film The Birdcage. Personally, I would have felt mortified if such earth was moved to fit my schedule. If Lane felt similarly, he didn’t let it stop him from taking part in the film.
Lane’s presence in the movie is absolutely worth delaying an entire Broadway production a calendar year for though. Not only is the performance outstanding, but as the one gay actor in the cast, he adds legitimacy to The Birdcage as a call for queer acceptance. According to Lane, he wasn’t fully out at the time, and he never discussed his sexuality with Williams or Nichols1, but both his co-star and director respected him and his craft immensely, giving Lane room to make the role his.
One of the funniest recurring themes in my research for this column is how different directors handle the problem of Robin Williams’s improv. The man was a supremely talented actor both comedically and dramatically, but made film production difficult for everyone else because he just couldn’t stop ad libbing scenes. In Mrs. Doubtfire, director Chris Columbus would just let him go on and on for hours and hours, leading to multiple cuts of the movie for different age ratings. In Jumanji, the star was more restrained, allowed only a few off-script takes before production had to move on.
For The Birdcage, Williams and Lane (another supremely talented improviser) were given a chance to get it all out of their system before any footage was shot. The principal cast (now including Hackman, Wiest, and Hank Azaria, more on him in a bit) came together for three weeks of rehearsals before shooting began. During this time, they were allowed to improvise jokes and dialogue to see what worked and what didn’t before a single camera got involved. Elaine May was present to take the best stuff they came up with and add it to the script. By the time shooting actually started, they didn’t have to do hundreds of takes to find the best version of the movie.
This strategy was masterful. The version of The Birdcage we got from it is the best that we could have asked for at the time. Sure, a movie with this many gay characters would have more gay actors nowadays, and the occasional use of the f-slur still makes me cringe a bit. But in terms of hilariously executing its plot and exploring its themes of masculinity, family, and gender as performance, The Birdcage is simply stupendous.
Williams and Lane are outstanding as the leads. The dynamic between Albert and Armand charms from the moment we meet them, in part because of its familiarity. These are not oversexed, promiscuous men, throwing weekly orgies above their Miami nightclub. In nearly every way they resemble the classic vision of a heterosexual couple that’s been together for 20 years: one figure masculine, no nonsense, trying to keep things together, the other partner more emotional and dramatic, a people person who gets a little kick out of needling the love of their life from time to time. If the two men were instead a man and a woman, their dynamic would be too cliché for a network sitcom.
But because the dynamic is instead being played out by two men, it’s suddenly a revelation of normalcy. Lane does a fantastic job alternating between panicking on the edge of a breakdown one moment before becoming the most confident queen in the room the next. Williams, on the other hand, is surprisingly intense most of the time. This is a man dedicated to the stability of both his family and his business, and the success of both is a testament to his ability. Sure, the comic gets many a laugh in, but he’s the “straight” one here, a precursor to more serious roles that would come later in the decade for him.
Despite the contrast between the two characters, it always works because you never doubt their commitment to one another. When Armand’s son, Val, makes the frankly ludicrous suggestion that his father’s partner of two decades simply go away so as to not threaten his rash engagement, Armand only considers it briefly before standing up for the man who is in almost all ways his husband. To do otherwise would be to deny the deep importance each man has for the other. “Who could object to legal matrimony between these men?” the movie asks us.
There’s a line early on where Val tells his dad that he’s the only member of his fraternity who doesn’t come from a broken home. Despite the fact that his mother abandoned him at birth and he was raised by an unwed gay couple, Val is an outstandingly upright guy, and doesn’t consider his upbringing as anything but regular and healthy. This is a result of the love between Albert and Armand fostering a positive environment, and yet so many hand wringing straight moralizers would see their household and decry it as the downfall of America, just as Hackman’s Senator Keeley does in the movie.
In the interests of farce, The Birdcage does a fun job contrasting the two families at its core. In contrast to the (mostly) healthy dynamics down in Miami, the Keeleys in Ohio have it much more stressful. The relationship between the Senator and his wife seems strained and focused on the couple projecting an image of heteronormative, Christian moral success. Once the scandals begin unfolding around the Senator, however, the underlying tension between him and his wife escalates more and more until by the end of the movie, you wonder if these two people, paragons of Conservative social ideology, even like one another. Hackman and Wiest absolutely kill it in their roles, with the former telling The Advocate how happy he was to be back to working in proper comedies again (I guess Hackman also didn’t love Get Shorty).
The Keeleys putting on the face of a happy all-American family isn’t the only way the movie deals with gender expression as performance. In one of the funniest scenes in The Birdcage, Armand tries to teach Albert how to pass as straight in hopes of presenting him as Val’s visiting uncle. By framing traditional masculinity merely as another act for a drag queen to rehearse, the film is helpfully pointing out that all gender expression, by virtue of it being our outward depiction of ourselves to others, is performance. Even when you are being truthful about how masculine or feminine you really are in that expression, it’s all still performative because it’s how people are perceiving us. We’re putting on a show for others, even when we’re just being ourselves.
Gender expression and the value of love and family are big topics for a movie to cover simultaneously, but not only does The Birdcage explore them masterfully, but it does so while being a truly hilarious comedy. The weeks of rehearsal before shooting makes every joke and twisting line of dialogue feel perfectly refined, even if they started off as ad-libs. Half of my notes during this most recent rewatch were clever jokes I had written down (“Chewing gum helps me think.” “Sweetie, you’re wasting your gum.”) and the other half were me gushing in all caps over some of the costume choices on display, especially on Robin Williams. The striped beach pajamas and backwards cap? Just absolutely killer.
By the time the movie has escalated to the third act, the comedic tension is sharp enough to slice through steel as Albert opts to disguise himself as Val’s mother using his skills as a drag queen. In the past I’ve found the actual dinner between the two families to be my least favorite part of The Birdcage, but this time around I thought it was totally delightful. Albert-as-Mother becomes this image of a conservative housewife, taking stances on topics like abortion to their absurd extremes (“The doctors are only doing their jobs! If you’re going to kill someone, kill the mothers. That’ll stop them.”), in the process endearing himself more and more to the conservative senator who disagrees with the value of Albert’s very existence. It’s incredible stuff, before and after the wig inevitably comes off.
My only big gripe with The Birdcage is Hank Azaria. The actor and Simpsons voice talent plays Agador in the movie, the flamboyant Guatemalan housekeeper to Albert and Armand. Like most of the cast, Azaria is not gay. Instead, he looked to friends who were drag queens and asked for their feedback on his take on the effeminate character. If it were just a matter of a straight actor playing a very gay character, Azaria’s performance would be a bit disappointing but not any more so than Robin Williams doing the same thing in the same movie.
What actually makes me pause is the fact that Azaria is basically performing the role in cultural brown face. He throws on this thick attempt at a Latino accent that is both impressive in its consistency (he was Apu, after all!) but also pretty gross in its characterization of another race (he was Apu, after all). The intentional change of the housekeeper character from a black gay man in La Cage aux Folles to a Latino one for The Birdcage was done so the movie could sidestep thorny conversations about race dynamics, but the use of a straight white actor doing a funny voice to depict a flamboyant Hispanic manservant is like sidestepping a rosebush and ending up bouncing off the side of a passing box truck.
As well as the rest of the movie has aged in its critiques of social conservatism and the power of love and family, this element of it will never look good. Azaria, no stranger to controversies regarding his depiction of non-white races, now admits that, proud as he is of his work on the movie, he would never be cast as Agador in a modern version of The Birdcage, and that that’s for the best.
Azaria’s performance aside, I really love The Birdcage. It’s a sharply written comedy featuring excellent performances from everyone involved amid beautiful locations while wearing killer outfits. The messages about family, love, and acceptance hold up well today, as do the references to Republican figures who are still relevant in the 2020s, like Jeb Bush and the only recently departed Rush Limbaugh. This was my third time watching The Birdcage and it gets better each time I see it.
The critical response to the movie was strong, and after covering the biggest movies of the previous months, I can understand why. A movie this expertly put together is a breath of glorious fresh air compared to mediocre tripe like Up Close & Personal or Broken Arrow. The movie holds an 84% on Rotten Tomatoes, with positive reviews from the usual top reviewers: Roger Ebert, Owen Gleiberman from Entertainment Weekly, Desson Howe from Washington Post, and plenty more all loved it.
A movie like this was always going to be controversial, though. Beyond critics who simply didn’t enjoy the filmmaking on display like Edward Guthmann at SF Gate (he called it a “glossy miscalculation” and thought that Williams was miscast in the more serious role), there were plenty of members of the gay community who weren’t happy with what they saw on screen. Essayist Bruce Bawer complained about watching the movie with a gay friend in silent shock while the straight audience around them “was just laughing it up.”
“They,” Bawer said in reference to that straight crowd, “don’t get anything outside a narrow Hollywood idea of gay life.”
To be fair to Bawer2, it could have been frustrating to see gay men in studio comedies at the time reduced over and over again to just flamboyant drag queens in movies like Priscilla, Queen of the Desert [4/5], To Wong Foo, and now The Birdcage. There were and are far more things that gay men can be in this world, and movies should better reflect that reality. On the other hand, that’s a problem with Hollywood producers and their approval process for movies, not the movies themselves. Films like The Birdcage never claim to speak for the experiences of all gay men, instead offering one vision of the demographic at a time when much of straight America may not even have known someone confidently out of the closet.
The Birdcage also had its defenders in the LGBT community. The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (or GLAAD) praised the film for “[going] beyond the stereotypes to see the characters' depth and humanity.” The film was later nominated for a GLAAD Media Award for Best Film (Wide Release), though it did lose to the Wachowskis’ Bound.
Recent appraisal for The Birdcage has also been loving. This is extremely anecdotal, but I love this thread from the r/AskGayBrosOver30 subreddit talking about how the movie has aged somewhat but is still a blast to watch. Critic Manuel Betancourt wrote in 2021 that his relationship with the movie had improved as he had come to better understand his own sexuality:
In its campy theatrics, The Birdcage encourages us all to be more like Albert, to see in his gay femininity a kind of strength we all too often mock and disparage. Sometimes even within ourselves.
I was surprised when I saw that The Birdcage had topped the weekend box office in 1996, but I was absolutely floored when I saw how successful it really was. The movie stayed on top of the charts for an entire month, setting the record for most weeks at number one for 1996. Even after it slipped from the top spot, you could find it in the top 10 until June, so it was making money for months after release. By the time it left theaters in August and finished its international run, The Birdcage had made over $180 million on a $31 million budget, making it the 9th highest grossing movie of 1996.
Did this Robin Williams comedy change the average American’s mind on gay marriage? After all, it was financially successful enough to indicate a wide reach and maybe even repeat viewings. Plenty of Americans saw The Birdcage. Was its message of love and acceptance for all heard by those viewers, even those who were against non-straight matrimony? Some at the time seemed to think so. In an op-ed for the New York Times, Frank Rich suggested that the success of The Birdcage suggested a shift in public opinion towards gay marriage:
In "The Birdcage"...same-sex marriage is presented in exactly that conservative fashion -- as an enclave of familial stability in a country full of broken homes. If Nielsen and box-office numbers tell us anything, it's that this message has a huge constituency. Politicians who plan to run this year on a platform of exclusionary family values had better stop by the mall to check out what their voters are applauding in the multiplex.
Later in 1996, President Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act into law, codifying the federal definition of marriage as being between one man and one woman.
Nationwide recognition of gay marriage would take nearly two more decades to reach fruition in the US, even though everyone went out and saw The Birdcage. It’s a sad reminder that as powerful as great art can be, the wheels of bureaucracy and culture at large turn slowly. They do, though, eventually turn.
The Birdcage is a delightful movie that both beautifully adapts its source material for its time and has stayed relevant in the years since its release. Its sharp writing and wonderful performances shine decades later, and its messages remain hopeful even today, despite some poorly aged casting decisions. Every time I watch this movie, I enjoy it more. Next time, it might move into that All Time Great category for me. Until that day comes, I heartily recommend it to everyone.
Rating: 4.5/5
What Else Was In Theaters?
Homeward Bound II: Lost in San Francisco released into theaters the same day as The Birdcage, taking the second place spot behind it. I haven’t watched it in years, but I remember really liking it as a kid. I’ll give it a 3.5/5 for now and hope it’s not actually terrible.
Though it was a limited release, classic black comedy Fargo also found its way into the world that day, debuting in 16th place. It would peak at 6th a few weeks later, but its legacy and quality far outstrip its initial theatrical pull. 5/5.
Next Week: You have no idea how happy I am to be talking about good movies again. The trend continues next week as we take a look back at legal thriller Primal Fear.
See you then!
-Will
Unfortunately yet appropriately ironic for the start of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell era
Bawer, for the record, was both an early proponent of gay marriage and, later, an extreme Islamophobe who believed that Europe would collapse due to non-white immigration into the continent. This doesn’t make his feelings towards The Birdcage less valid, but it does make me like him a lot less.