The Birdcage is about a drag queen who hardly ever dresses in drag, believes in family values, and never touches his live in lover of 20-plus years. These plot points are essential to the movie’s commercial prospects; indeed, The Birdcage is going to make a lot of money because of its boundless hypocrisy. It preaches tolerance while having a good laugh at the expense of two mincing, shrieking, weeping male caricatures of women. It preaches understanding but refuses to show us any questionable sexual or physical behavior that might make understanding a bit more diffcult. The only consistent target of its animus is a politically conservative U.S. senator who is co-founder of a group called Coalition for Moral Order. It’s acceptable to dress up in women’s clothes and have pornographic statuary around your house, director Mike Nichols and screenwriter Elaine May are telling us; it’s quite another thing to oppose abortion and think women should stay at home with their children. Tolerance apparently has its limits.
Its most telling moment comes at the film’s climax, when the senator discovers that the matronly, ferociously right-wing housewife to whom he feels a strange attraction is actually a man in a dress. The two of them have just completed a long conversation over dinner about abortion during which the drag queen wonders why pro4ifers want to kill abortion doctors: “I say kill the mothers. After all, the fetus is going to get it either way, so why not go down with the ship!”
“They don’t make women like that anymore,” says the love-smitten senator, and so finds himself speechless when the drag queen removes his wig to reveal the middle-aged homosexual underneath. And then the drag queen speaks a line that ought to be another joke. “Senator,” he says, “I meant what I said about family values and the need for a return to morality.”
But it’s not a joke; Nichols and May mean us to take the drag queen seriously. And so we see American liberalism at low ebb not only in the White House but at our multiplex — so bereft of conviction that it can only try to steal the ideas and terminology of its ideological enemies on the right while seeking to congratulate itself for its courage and openness.
It’s a gambit as clever as the one Bill Clinton has been playing these past few months, and Nichols and May follow theirs to its logical conclusion. Though the movie is a slavishly faithful remake of the 1977 French hit La Cage aux Folles, still the most popular foreign-language film ever shown in the United States, its tone is entirely different. La Cage is what they used to call a “saucy Gallic romp,” a door-slamming farce that celebrates the sybaritic life; its drag queen dresses in women’s clothing even when off stage. The Birdcage is so intent on sanitizing the gay life its drag queen wears weird leisure suits straight out of the 1970s unless he is on stage performing in a Miami revue.
The difference between the two films is telling. These days Hollywood builds movies the way political campaigns build support — by trying to figure out how to appeal to the widest number of people while simultaneously sending knowing winks to core supporters. The Birdcage allows the unenlightened to scream with laughter at the outrageous behavior of the drag queen and his equally fey maid (Nathan Lane and Hank Azaria, respectively, who are, it must be said, hilarious), while bowing to 1990s convention by having the tiresome Robin Williams spout liberation-speak every few minutes (” I spent 20 years becoming who I am and I know who I am and I don’t need to be anything other than who I am” etc. etc.).
American moviegoers show no gn that they feel natural sympathy for a man compelled by a misconceived sense of self to make himself appear to be a woman; indeed, last summer’s drag comedy, To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar!, died at the box offce due to the anxiety such a freakshow sight inspires in audiences.
Nichols and May answer it by making their drag queen an uncloseted version of the closet case Felix Unger, played by Tony Randall on the 1970s television rendition of Nell Simon’s The Odd Couple. “I don’t have to be reasonable,” Randali’s Unger liked to say. “I’m a CRAZY PERSON!” So, too, with Nathan Lane’s Albert; he’s a delightful nut-case and a star to boot, so what can you do with such a man? Love him, only love him, the movie says, even though five minutes in the real-life company of such a person would send any rational soul screaming for the exits.
The movie’s message is that we can all just get along if we appreciate and accept each other (unless we’re right-wing, but then another drag queen informs us that “Bob Dole is just gorgeous”). And it concludes with a wedding that inadvertently reveals the lie behind this straight-outta-Hallmark philosophy. Robin Williams’s son, conceived during a one-night stand 20 years ago, is marrying the senator’s daughter. He is Jewish, she Episcopalian. And so, in the sight of the entire congregation, they are married by a priest and a rabbi, an explicit parallel to the marriage the movie makes between the world of gays and the world of straights.
Yes. Well. Straight and gay, Jew and Gentile, we can all intermix and intermingle. But, you see, Jews aren’t supposed to marry Gentiles. That’s what the Bible says. (It says some stuff about homosexuality too.)
By John Podhoretz
