A raucous remake of the French farce "La Cage aux Folles," "The Birdcage" is a funny film, with terrific performances by headliners Robin Williams, as an aging gay man, and Gene Hackman and Dianne Wiest as an uptight conservative couple he hosts at a dinner party while trying to act straight.
But the real scene-stealer here is Nathan Lane, a scream as Williams' longtime, flaming drag-queen companion.
The story is based on a singularly commercial premise — an aging gay couple pretends to be straight for the sake of the son they have raised together, who is about to marry into an ultra-conservative family.
Williams plays Armand, the older, more stable member of this duo, having fathered his son Val (Dan Futterman) during a one-night-stand some 20 years earlier.
And in this role, Williams performs with relative calm, allowing Lane, as the outrageous Albert, to run off with the picture. As the star of Armand's South Beach, Miami, gay club — called The Birdcage — Lane plays his squealing, cross-dressing, ridiculously insecure character to the hilt.
Audiences will especially chortle as Armand tries in vain to teach Albert to dine, converse and walk like a man, and they'll howl at the big, extended climactic sequence, during which Williams meets his future in-laws.
Hackman is an Ohio Republican senator, and co-founder of the Coalition for Moral Order, whose politics are somewhere to the right of Patrick Buchanan, if that's not off the scale. And Wiest is his easily flustered wife. Both actors are perfect, and their reactions only make Albert's big moment funnier, as he bursts into the dinner party in drag, claiming to be Val's mother.
The original French film, with hilarious performances by Michel Serrault and Ugo Tognazzi, was a huge success nearly 20 years ago — and for a time it wore the crown as the biggest moneymaking foreign film in American box-office history. (There were also two less successful sequels, followed by an American stage adaptation that became a hit musical on Broadway.)
Surprisingly, this new film is meticulously faithful to the original, right down to the smallest gags. And, yet, while the details are on-target, something vital is missing.
As directed by Mike Nichols ("The Graduate," "Heartburn," "Wolf"), "The Birdcage" has scenes that sag and . . . no pun intended . . . drag, padded with sentimental pap about tolerance, family values and laced with jabs at contemporary conservatism. In this context, however, they seem clueless.
The original "La Cage" managed to infuse its farcical elements with a subtext of poignancy. Its messages were kept in subtext, so that while we were laughing at the antics of this frantic gay couple, they also earned our affection. In other words, the French screenwriters understood that if the audience makes a connection with the characters, tolerance is a natural byproduct.
But the screenplay for "The Birdcage," adapted by Elaine May ("Heaven Can Wait," "A New Leaf"), while faithfully retaining most of the plot and gags from the original, forgets all about subtext. Instead it is often strident, in the most typical Hollywood manner.
It's also cynical, as demonstrated when Armand tries to patch things up with Albert after a serious spat. They have been together for 20 years, but in this pseudo-poignant moment, their love is sealed with a palimony contract. Right.
"The Birdcage" is also slack in its comic delivery, paced more casually than the French version, which was fairly frenetic. The evidence is provided by the respective films' running times: "La Cage" was about 90 minutes long, while "The Birdcage" is a full two hours. And feels like it.
And yet, because there are so many big laughs here, thanks largely to the remarkable cast, it's hard to imagine that audience members will mind, or even notice most of the film's lapses.
Robin Williams alone is enough to ensure that "The Birdcage" will be a hit, and most of the film is funny enough to keep the audience laughing through the finale. In fact, the biggest laughs come during the final reel, during that climactic guess-who's-coming-to-dinner set-piece, which should provide plenty of positive exit polls.
There are also plenty of laughs provoked by the indignant reactions of Hackman and Wiest and the prancing slapstick of Hank Azaria as Williams and Lane's housekeeper.
In the end, however, this is Lane's showcase. Lane is a Broadway star who has labored in movie supporting roles until now ("Frankie and Johnny," "Life With Mikey," the voice of Timon in "The Lion King"), but he really gets his big cinematic break here — and he runs with it.
"The Birdcage" is rated R for profanity, vulgarity, partial nudity (Azaria's outrageous outfits) and some lewd art.