The Birdcage
Robin Williams and Nathan Lane pretending to be straight, badly, for two hours.
A farce where the gay couple are the sane ones and the conservatives are the joke.
- 1996
- 119 min
- 85% on Rotten Tomatoes
- 7.2 on IMDb
- #nostalgic
- #comedy
Our take
A drag club owner and his partner have to perform heterosexuality for one dinner so their son can impress the family of an ultra-conservative senator. The premise is pure farce and the execution is Nathan Lane in a career-best performance as Albert, who cannot butch it up and shouldn't have to.
The reason it lasts is that the film never asks us to laugh at the couple. Their marriage is the most functional relationship on screen; the senator's family is the punchline. Twenty-odd years on, the closing shot of everyone escaping in drag reads less like a gag and more like a strategy.
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Scores
Ours
- Jibbi Score — 4.5 out of 5 rainbows. A farce where the gay couple are the sane ones and the conservatives are the joke.
Everyone else’s
- Rotten Tomatoes — 85%, via OMDb.
- IMDb — 7.2 out of 10 from 110,097 votes, via OMDb.
- Metacritic — 71 out of 100, via OMDb.
- TMDB — 7.0 out of 10 from 1,388 votes, refreshed daily.
The plot, officially
A gay cabaret owner and his drag queen partner agree to put up a false heterosexual front so that their son can introduce them to his fiancée's conservative parents.
Synopsis and poster via TMDB.