Mike Nichols (1996)
I hadn’t seen La Cage aux Folles in any of its stage or screen versions until Sally and I went to the current revival of the Harvey Fierstein-Jerry Herman musical at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre. Watching this was a prompt to make up for lost time as far as films based on Jean Poiret’s play (originally staged in 1973) are concerned. The first La Cage aux Folles picture (1978), directed by Édouard Molinaro, isn’t available on Netflix or Amazon Prime so we tried Mike Nichols’s The Birdcage. I’m guessing we may now have seen treatments as different from each other as it’s possible to get while staying essentially faithful to the source material. Tim Sheader’s production in Regent’s Park is a good show with some brilliant dancing but unsatisfying as musical comedy. There’s not an interesting characterisation in sight: as one half of the central gay partnership and the eponymous nightclub’s drag headliner, Carl Mullaney, although certainly the star performer, shows all the emotional vulnerability of a pantomime dame. In contrast, Mike Nichols is almost indifferent to the nightclub routines, which are few and peripheral to a richer confection of rom-com farce and political satire. (The latter almost anticipates Nichols’s next film, Primary Colors (1998).)
The Birdcage is full of splendid character work and I enjoyed it a lot even though the film feels in two ways tentative. One aspect of this is puzzling. Nichols occasionally gives the impression of still making up his mind how a scene should be staged and played with the result that it seems like a rehearsal. The other aspect is less unexpected. The first Broadway production of the Fierstein-Herman musical – and Gloria Gaynor’s hit with ‘I Am What I Am’, the show’s signature number – preceded The Birdcage by over a decade. Even so, the movie was made well before LGBTQ+ identity was widely proclaimed or presented as mainstream, as it is in plenty of media treatment today. Nichols’s film isn’t timid but does give off a slight don’t-frighten-the-horses vibe, thanks to rationed coverage of the drag show and some stereotyping of the gay characters (that’s what it now looks like anyway).
Stephen Sondheim wrote a couple of tracks for it but The Birdcage, compared with the Regent’s Park spectacle, is for the most part doubly unmusical. Nichols’s choice of theme song is perfect, though. Sister Sledge’s ‘We Are Family’, which features at both ends of the film, is a long-standing gay-club favourite; the song’s lyric can be seen to nod humorously both to the unusual family unit at the heart of the story and to ‘family values’ as a conservative political slogan, which is also crucial to the narrative. Nichols’s old sparring partner Elaine May, who wrote the screenplay, has moved the action from St Tropez to South Beach in Miami: Armand Goldman (Robin Williams) owns and runs The Birdcage club there; his life partner, Albert (Nathan Lane), tops the bill (as ‘Starina’). The couple live over the shop, their ménage completed by the flamboyantly gay Guatemalan housekeeper, Agador (Hank Azaria), who longs to be part of the show downstairs. Armand has a twenty-something son, Val (Dan Futterman), the result of his father’s long-ago drunken one-night stand with a woman who had better things to do than raise the boy. Val grew up with Armand and Albert, who has been like a mother to him. The plot’s mainspring is Val’s return home with the news that he’s getting married. His fiancée is Barbara (Calista Flockhart), whose father is Republican Senator Kevin Keeley (Gene Hackman), Vice-President of the so-called Coalition for Moral Order.
Keeley and his wife Louise (Dianne Wiest) get plenty of screen time from the start. As an ambitious politician, Keeley is ‘very glad I got on Jackson’s bandwagon instead of Dole’s’ – until, that is, Senator Eli Jackson, co-founder of the Coalition, is found dead in bed alongside ‘an underage black whore’ (Trina McGee-Davis). Keeley’s urgent need to extricate himself from the resulting scandal supplies a good reason to hotfoot it to Florida and, in doing so, reassert family values – though he makes clear to the press that his meeting with his daughter’s fiancé’s parents will be a private occasion. The scandal also means the senator and his wife have cause to be nervous of their South Beach hosts’ moral disapproval, as well as vice versa. That gives an extra edge to the dinner party chez Armand and Albert. Nichols and May were evidently keen to get up-to-the-minute GOP lampooning into The Birdcage and the repeated references to Senator Bob Dole are a reminder of how impregnable a front-runner he was for the Republican presidential nomination in 1996. The film was released in American cinemas in early March that year, well before the end of primaries season. Yet the script is confident enough not to name-check real Republicans other than Dole (except for ‘the Bushes’ and neither Jeb nor Dubya was actually a candidate for the 1996 nomination).
For the purposes of the Keeleys’ visit, Armand pretends to be a cultural attaché to Greece – that’s what Barbara has told her parents he is – as well as straight and less Jewishly surnamed (as ‘Mr Coleman’). The household’s preparations for their guests involve frantic efforts to neutralise (a) the apartment’s décor and (b) Albert’s presence. Armand, accompanied by Albert, visits Val’s mother, Katharine (Christine Baranski), now a highflying businesswoman, who agrees to a new one-night-only arrangement: she’ll come to Miami posing as Armand’s wife. Armand’s actual wife refuses to absent himself for the evening but reluctantly accepts the supporting role of Val’s sober-suited Uncle Albert. Profoundly unmanly Albert is inept in the role: everyone else is relieved when he can’t go through with it and locks himself away, almost literally in the closet. Katharine gets stuck in traffic, however, so Albert decides to join the gathering in an uncharacteristically sensible wig, blouse, jacket and skirt. Senator Keeley is charmed by frumpishly dressed-down Mrs Coleman and her folksy plain-speaking, though it sometimes has a sting in the tail. When the senator pronounces that ‘Homosexuality is one of the things that’s weakening this country’, his hostess replies, ‘You know, that’s what I thought until I found out Alexander the Great was a fag. Talk about gays in the military …’
Gene Hackman produces an exquisitely uneasy look in response to that and the whole dinner party episode is a glorious display of ensemble comedy playing, verbal and physical. Agador is made to change out of his usual maid’s wear – ‘big hair’ red wig, thong, etc – to pose in formal butler’s garb as ‘Spartacus’, who looks and moves like a member of the Addams family. Agador normally goes round barefoot: he warns Armand and Val that he falls over whenever he wears shoes and does just that even before the Keeleys are through the door. (As the desperate momentum increases, the intentional pratfalls are so many you barely notice as unintended Robin Williams’s trip in the kitchen when Agador-Spartacus, who’s also chef for the night, is trying tearfully to defend his ‘sweet and sour peasant soup’. This is a fine let’s-keep-it-in moment: watching it back on YouTube, you can see and enjoy Hank Azaria’s and Dan Futterman’s strenuous efforts not to corpse.) Things duly fall apart when Albert’s wig develops a life of its own and, while he and others are offstage trying to fix it, Katharine finally arrives late and introduces herself to the Keeleys as previously agreed. But with a press pack gathering outside, Senator Keeley has no means of escaping unnoticed except via the nightclub and in disguise – that is, en travesti. On the way out, to the strains of ‘We Are Family’, the bouffant-blonde senator still fares better than his wife. She changes her dress, puts on drag make-up and is told by a Birdcage habitué, ‘I’ve never danced with a man before’. ‘There’s always a first time’, Mrs Keeley replies throatily.
The casting might come in for flak today: Nathan Lane is the only gay actor playing a gay character – and he hadn’t come out publicly at the time The Birdcage was made. Besides, he’s not trans and Albert is pretty well unarguably a woman trapped in a man’s body. This is a performance of dexterity and charm even if Lane’s portrait of Albert, possibly because of his background in theatre (he hadn’t been in many films before this one), sometimes comes over as a highly accomplished turn. It isn’t a major objection but I wasn’t sure Lane always distinguished Albert’s drama-queening from his genuine hurt feelings. At the start, he’s refusing to go on stage as Starina, telling Armand that ‘I’m fat and hideous’ and Agador that ’Victoria Page will not dance the dance of the red shoes tonight – or any other night’. It’s hard to discern much difference between this melodramatic posturing and Albert’s flouncing out after opening Katharine’s office door to see her running her fingers through Armand’s chest hair for old times’ sake. On paper, the maid-artiste wannabe is more of a cartoon but Hank Azaria’s amazing vocal gifts make Agador somehow believable, as well as very funny. Demanding to know why he can’t be in the show, he asks if Armand is ‘afraid of my Guatemalaness’ (pronounced Guate-male-a-ness). There’s true pain in his voice as, sobbing over a hot stove, Agador insists his peasant soup wasn’t a starter but ‘an entrée … is like a stew – is why I put so much in it …’ (Azaria’s terrific Latino accent is also liable to censure nowadays, of course.)
Greatly gifted as he was, there was always a risk that a Robin Williams performance would major in hyper-zaniness or sentimentality with not much in between. It’s a relief that his playing of Armand is so well judged: his comedy, one bull’s eye after another, is rooted in character; in Williams’s more obviously heartfelt bits, there’s only rarely a hint of moist eyes. Dan Futterman manages a difficult balancing act: he conveys Val’s dilemma without making him a prig and nicely avoids the potential mawkish pitfall of the big moment when Val comes clean to his in-laws-to-be and announces that Albert is ‘my mother’ and the nightclub’s leading lady. Calista Flockhart has a thankless task but is likeable enough as Barbara. Even though Katharine sometimes seems surplus to plot requirements, Christine Baranski is, as usual, good value. Elaine May has written and/or borrowed from Jean Poiret so many great lines that it can’t be said the devil has all the best tunes. But he does have the best two singers: Dianne Wiest and Gene Hackman are outstanding as the reactionary Keeleys.
Just as well because the screenplay’s political emphasis is a bit excessive and threatens to eclipse the comic love stories, never more so than at the very end of the film. Once the Senator and his wife have clambered into the safety of the car that drives them away from South Beach, The Birdcage simply stops. One earlier sequence has made especially clear that Mike Nichols’s priority lies in showcasing the talents of his cast rather than the nightclub’s drag acts: Armand’s rehearsal of a doomed-to-fail dance number between Albert/Starina and a grumpy hunk partner called Celsius (Luca Tommassini) seems to be included chiefly in order for Robin Williams to go into (excellent) lightning impressions of famous choreographic styles – Bob Fosse, Martha Graham, Twyla Tharp, Michael Kidd, Madonna. And while it’s true that the closing titles play over shots of Val and Barbara’s (Jewish-Christian) wedding ceremony, this is no more than a curtain call for the people we’ve been watching for the last two hours. Fair enough, though: everyone in The Birdcage deserves to take a bow.
3 August 2023
