One of the more contentious films in Mike Nichols’ career was The Birdcage, whose admirers and detractors seem divided among both age and location lines.
Mike Nichols was never one to shy away from films as political commentary, having started his film career directing the one-two punch of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolfe? and The Graduate. Woolfe was a commentary on sexual relations and The Graduate was a commentary on growing up disillusioned by capitalism. He maintained his commitment to political commentary into the 90s.
By 1996, the gay rights movement had finally started picking up steam again. After being long derailed by the AIDS crisis for over a decade, there were finally medications to move the community past the death sentence portion of the crisis and back into living again. The queer movement had been making huge steps towards acceptance, but were still a long ways away from the mainstream acceptance we see now. Major stars had started being outed by the AIDS crisis, and other celebrities were making headway into the normalization of homosexuality. Elton John had come out in 1988. Madonna was putting gay people up front in 1992’s Truth or Dare, which included the NYC Pride moment of silence (a singular moment right up there with the memorial footage from The Times of Harvey Milk). Still, Ellen wouldn’t come out until 1997, and George Michael wouldn’t come out until 1998.
From the point of view as a teenager in the midwest at that time, all of this was behind the scenes. Gays were still relatively nowhere to be seen. Elton’s homosexuality was still on the DL in the magazines. Periodically, you’d see AIDS stuff, but that was aimed at both gays and straights. In my middle school, we even had a guest speaker being a woman with HIV who gave birth to a kid who didn’t have HIV (talk about mixed messages). Homosexuality wasn’t talked about much. The closest we had was To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar, a drag queen movie that I still find insufferably hetero.
Enter The Birdcage. The main draw of The Birdcage was Robin Williams (R.I.P.), a heterosexual sometimes-family-friendly comedic actor who had just come off Jumanji and Mrs. Doubtfire. When Robin Williams starred in a remake of an 80s French farce about a gay couple who have to go straight in order to please their son’s fiancee’s family, there was much consternation. Luckily, my parents were relatively politically progressive, and knew there was nothing perverted in The Birdcage, so we got to see it as a family affair. In theaters.
La Cage Aux Folles, the original stage play that became a film, is very very French. It was one of a long line of French farces that made headway into the American consciousness. Albert and Armand are an aging gay couple. Armand owns a drag bar, and Albert is the main star. Armand has a college-aged son from a previous drunken fling with a co-star. When the son comes home engaged to a woman who comes from a conservative family, he wants the families to meet, and that means that Armand and Albert have to masquerade as straight to be accepted by the family.
Nichols and screenwriter Elaine May adapted the film to set it in Miami, with the conservative family being a rabidly family values right wing politician who had been sidelined by another right wing politician’s sex scandal (died in bed with a black underage prostitute). The wedding between the families was meant to cover over the scandal, considering they believed that Armand was a cultural attache to Greece and Albin was a housemom. Where Albert and Armand bend over backwards to adapt for their son’s happiness, the conservative family plots to use their daughter for their political advantage. All of this was used from the plot of the original film, despite it feeling timely to modern America.
Some lovers of the original feel that the over-the-top farcical nature of La Cage Aux Folles makes it the cream of the crop. Nichols toned down Albert, and ramped up Armand a little, to create a mix that was both non-farcical and acceptable to midwest audiences. This was a loving pair of gay people, and The Birdcage worked wonders for creating an air of questioning the homosexual bigotry that still pervaded the culture. Gays were not just screaming queens who ran rampant through otherwise humdrum towns, or renegade sexual deviants. The Birdcage gave them both an opportunity to love and show the strength. The Birdcage is one of the few homosexual VHS movies that made it into a lot of midwestern homes.
That the movie was still hilarious without being shrill is a testament to its success. Not to knock La Cage, but The Birdcage was hilarious. Emmanuel Lubezki’s lush neon-and-pastel-drenched Miami cinematography fully captured the artifice and drama of the film. The opening shot, with the camera soaring over a deep blue version of the Gulf of Mexico as We Are Family plays while the credits sparkle before we enter the club, is a master class of quickly paced scene and mood setting. Robin Williams and Nathan Lane played spectacularly off each other as a married gay couple who have lived together for decades. The Birdcage became not only a movie that heteronormative people could relate to, but it challenged their social bigotry. Sure, it couldn’t single-handedly defeat decades of bigotry, but the broad American-style humor went a long way through penetrating the surface.
To read this review is to thing that The Birdcage was only political. It was a film that succeeded as both a film and as a political statement. Mike Nichols’ career was littered with films and plays of this duality. He somehow had his finger of the right movie for the right time in the right way for a large part of his career. His career was smart and long. He will be missed, but his legacy will remain.
The Birdcage is available streaming on Netflix and for free on Amazon Prime.