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The Birdcage (1996)

Posted By: Efgrapha

Date: 8 Oct 2014 14:28:24

The Birdcage (1996)
DVD9 | VIDEO_TS | PAL, 16:9 (720x576) VBR | 01:54:06 | 7.5 Gb
Audio: AC3 5.1 @ 384 Kbps (each): English, French, German, Italian, Spanish
Subs: English, English HoH, French, German, German HoH, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Polish
Genre: Comedy

Director Mike Nichols teams up with his former partner/screenwriter Elaine May for the first time in many years and for the first time together in films to create this sophisticated, remake of the phenomenally popular French musical farce La Cage aux Folles that stars Robin Williams, Nathan Lane, Gene Hackman and Diane Wiest as two dramatically disparate couples who manage to reconcile their vast differences for the sake of their children who are getting married. Williams plays Armand Goldman, the owner of a popular South Beach drag club known for putting on elaborate showcases starring his long-time lover/wife Albert (Lane) who appears as "Starina." Lately poor flamboyant, flighty Albert has been in crisis over the inexorable onset of middle age. He has been moody, paranoid and unbearably. When he gets too inconsolably distraught, handsome but clumsy houseboy Agador quietly slips Albert "Pirin" tablets (which he explains to Armand are simply Aspirin tablets with the "as" scraped off). Still though Albert can be a royal pain, Armand dearly loves him and the two live happily in their splendiferous apartment above the club. One day Armand's son Val (the result of Armand's single foray into straight sex) comes visiting with joyous news: he has found his dreamgirl and is getting married. The only trouble is, Barbara Keeley's father is the blustery ultra-religious right-wing Senator Keeley (Hackman), the founder of the Coalition for Moral Order. Senator Keeley and his colleagues are not as upright as they seem and when his closest associate is found dead beside a black, underage prostitute, Keeley finds his house surrounded by ravenous newshounds, hungry for dirt. Knowing that they are poised to ruin him, Keeley and his proper but slightly addled-wife (Wiest) decide that a big, elaborate, church wedding will be just the ticket to save his reputation. Barbara has neglected to tell them that Val's parents are gay, preferring to claim that they are members of the South Beach social elite. In a panic, she panics and calls Val who breaks the bad news to Armand and begs him to make the apartment less flamboyant and worst of all to hide Albert (who functioned as Val's mother while the youth grew up) during the visit. Armand is angry, but loving his son, finally, reluctantly agrees, knowing that he will deeply wound his companion. Unfortunately, Albert finds out and as a compromise tries to learn how to be macho so he can pretend to be Val's uncle, he is too much the Great Dame to ever pass as one of the guys and so is banned from the party. Armand then locates Catherine and asks her to masquerade as his wife. She agrees to show up later that evening. Meanwhile their friends busily redecorate the apartment until it looks as if it were done in "Early Inquisition." During the fateful dinner party, Catherine is late and Albert gets uproarious revenge. Achingly comic chaos ensues as Armand tries to hold the increasingly tenuous evening together while outside the newshounds bay and threaten to make even more trouble for Senator Keely.

Synopsis by Sandra Brennan, Allmovie.com

Hollywood has had a little cottage industry in recent years, turning out American retreads of French films. Now comes the remake of the most seductive target, the comedy "La Cage aux Folles" (1978), which is about a gay man whose son wants him to play it straight for a few days. All of this will be familiar if you've seen the original, or the two sequels, or the Broadway version.

"The Birdcage" isn't about plot, anyway. It's about character, and about the twisted logic of screwball comedy, in which everybody acts the craziest just when they're trying to make the most sense.

What makes Mike Nichols' version more than just a retread is good casting in the key roles, and a wicked screenplay by Elaine May, who keeps the original story but adds little zingers here and there ("Live on Fisher Island and get buried in Palm Beach - that way you'll get the best of Florida!").

The movie stars Robin Williams as Armand Goldman, the owner-operator of a drag revue on South Beach. He lives upstairs over his nightclub with Albert (Nathan Lane), the star of the show, who has been his lover for some 20 years. Albert is a basket case, threatened by encroaching age and insecurity. He functions only because Agador (Hank Azaria), the flamboyant houseboy, tranquilizes him with Pirin tablets. ("They're just aspirin with the `as' scraped off," Agador confides to Armand.) A crisis. Armand's son Val (Dan Futterman) has become engaged (to a girl, I should add), and wants to bring her home to meet his dad, but not "Auntie Albert." The complication is that his fiancee's father is a conservative senator (Gene Hackman), who leads the Coalition for Moral Order and thinks the pope is too controversial and Billy Graham too liberal.

Albert is devastated that the boy he raised like his own son is turning his back on him. Armand is upset, too, but goes along with a masquerade in which Val's mother (Christine Baranski), who had Val after a one-night stand with Armand, will pretend to be Mrs. Goldman.

Imagine everything that can go wrong, including the peculiarity of Val having two mothers onstage at the same time, and you more or less have the rest of the movie.

Since the material is familiar, what's a little amazing is how fresh it seems at times, in the hands of the American cast. Robin Williams is the best surprise; in a role that seems written as a license for flamboyance, he's more restrained than in anything he's done since "Awakenings" (1990). Nathan Lane, from Broadway's "Guys and Dolls," doesn't have quite the semi-hysterical sincerity that Michel Serrault had in the original, and his impersonation of Val's mother is a little too obvious and over the top, but he works well the rest of the time, especially in his more pensive passages. One problem is that some of his biggest moments (as when he tries to practice walking like John Wayne) are telegraphed from the earlier movie.

Most of the biggest laughs, for me, came from Gene Hackman and Dianne Wiest, as the senator and his wife. Hackman's senator is weathering a crisis (his closest colleague has just died in bed with an underage prostitute), and thinks maybe meeting his new in-laws will appease his right-wing constituents by promoting family values.

Wiest, who sees and understands more than her husband but dotes on him, reads the situation in South Beach more quickly, but goes with the flow.

"The Birdcage" is the first time Mike Nichols and Elaine May, who helped define improvisational comedy in the 1950s, have worked together on a movie. What mostly sparkles from their work here is the dialogue, as when the senator's daughter, trying to cast the situation in the best possible light, explains that South Beach is "about two minutes from Fisher Island, where Jed Bush lives." Or when the Williams character surveys the crowd at his nightclub and whispers to the maitre d', "Free coffee for the Kennedys."

Review by Roger Ebert

IMDB 6,9/10 from 53 761 users

Wiki

Director: Mike Nichols

Writers: Elaine May, Jean Poiret, Francis Veber, Edouard Molinaro, Marcello Danon

Cast: Robin Williams, Gene Hackman, Nathan Lane, Dianne Wiest, Dan Futterman, Calista Flockhart, Hank Azaria, Christine Baranski and other