Directed by: Mike Nichols
Starring: Robin Williams, Nathan Lane, Gene Hackman, Dan Futterman, Calista Flockhart, Dianne Wiest, Hank Azaria, Christine Baranski
The Birdcage is a comedy with a better buildup than payoff. It contains a brilliant Robin Williams performance as a gay man pretending to be straight in order to dupe his son's fiancee's right-wing parents. It has all of the potential to be one of the great movie comedies, but The Birdcage sputters when it should be revving up.
Robin Williams plays Armand Goldman, owner of a popular Miami nightclub which features his life partner Albert (Lane) as his star drag act. As Albert enters middle age, he is insecure and dramatic to the nth degree, believing Armand is tired of him and having an affair. While histrionic, Lane is able to still be touching and this story arc pays off in a quiet, poignant manner which is the best scene in the movie. The rest of the film is noisy slapstick with Armand's son Val (Futterman), the product of Armand's only time he had sex with a woman, announcing he is marrying the daughter of right-wing senator Kevin Keeley (Hackman), leader of a moral majority movement which takes a huge hit when the movement's co-founder dies while sleeping with a fourteen-year-old prostitute.
The senator and his wife (Wiest) escape from their Ohio home, which is besieged by the media to Miami, to meet Armand and his "wife". Val has one tiny request of his supportive father: Pretend to be a straight couple for one night so he could impress his future in-laws. I question the wisdom of this ask, but we play along. Keeley and his family arrive in Miami and meet Armand (who for the night has changed his last name to Coleman and says he's a cultural attache), Albert (who dresses as a woman and passes herself off successfully as Val's mother), and the Goldmans' houseboy Agador (Azaria), who can't walk in a regular pair of dress shoes and makes soup as the only course of the evening. Oh, and the imprints on the bowls the soup is served in causes Keeley to pause.
All of this sounds potentially funnier than it is. The final act doesn't achieve liftoff and what we're left is a feeling of a golden missed opportunity populated by actors who are infinitely better than the material.
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