I know why The Birdcage stings
Mike Nichols' new gay-themed film may ruffle feathers

by Harry Kloman

THE SANDY SHORES OF MIAMI'S SOUTH BEACH are a pastel-and-neon mecca for beautiful people with sun-bronzed skin, rippling muscles and bodies so perfectly waxed that you could burn them at both ends.

And what a perfect place for a handsome young man to invite his beautiful young fiance and her parents a rather befuddled conservative senator and his dignified wife to meet the young man's folks.

Unless the folks are both men, one of whom owns a drag nightclub, and the other of whom performs there as a Judy Garland wannabe called Starina.

So it goes with The Birdcage, an Americanization of the lightweight French com edy La Cage aux Folles, which in 1978 was a few years ahead of its time. The director now is Mike Nichols, the writer Elaine May, the star Robin Williams. And the movie, which is in some ways updated for the '9Os, is also strangely in step with about as much tolerance as a stillnervous American audience is likely to accept.

La Cage aux Folles was an international hit that spawned two sequels and a Broad way musical. The Birdcage, a virtual scene-by-scene translation, has more energy and as much sentimentality. It's an uneven but satisfying comedy from two groundbreaking entertainers, with some glorious laughs, some sincere misfires, and a gay-positive sensibility that's almost as safe as it gets.

In The Birdcage, Williams plays the happy, successful, resolute Armand Goldman, who owns a splashy nightclub along the South Beach strip, and who after years of nagging self-doubt is finally comfortable with his sexuality. His patrons are a mix of genders and orientations, and they all come to see his colorful dance numbers and his headliner, Starina, the stage alter ego of Albert (Nathan Lane), Armand's husband of 20 years.

It's especially nice that Armand's son Val loves his two dads and totally supports their relationship. Still, there are limits: To host his future in-laws (Gene Hackman, Dianne Wiest) who are suffering fallout from a political ally's sex scandal Val changes the family name to the less Jewish-sounding "Coleman" and asks his father to make some changes in the household. Armand can butch up when he needs to. But not Albert, who's uncontrollably effeminate, and who's prone to loud hysterical cry ing fits over a piece of broken toast. So Val asks him to leave for a while.

Easily said. After a day of frantic rearranging in which everything gay or sexual in the house gets closeted away Armand decides, just for good measure, to ask Val's birth mother (Christine Baranski) to join the charade. But Albert, more hurt than he's willing to admit, decides to play the role himself.

IF TV'S INVENTIVE Your Show of Shows in the 1950s built the bridge between vaudeville and modern sketch comedy, then Mike Nichols and Elaine May were among the first to walk across it.

Nichols, who might well have had nothing to laugh about, was born in Germany in 1931, the son of a Jewish doctor. His family got out before they got caught. Raised in Chicago, wanderlust and a quick wit led him to the Actor's Studio in New York, but nobody seemed to want to cast him in a play. So he returned home, and at the University of Chicago he met May, a 24-year-old Philadelphia gal divorced and with a young daughter who'd been a child star in plays with her father, a Yiddish theater actor.

Their timing clicked, and they formed a comedy troupe that evolved into the famed Second City. Together with Alan Arkin, Shelley Berman, Barbara Harris and others, Nichols and May innovated a style of satirical sketch comedy that launched a new kind of American entertainment. They brought their own two-person show to Broadway in 1960, and after a successful run of a year, they went their own ways to do their own things.

For Nichols, that meant directing Broadway plays, winning seven Tonys, and mak ing classic movies. First came Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff? , then The Graduate and an Oscar, then Catch-22 , Carnal Knowledge and others, before a break from the movies to return to the stage, then a second cinema career with Silkwood, Heartburn and Postcards from the Edge .

Things went well but not quite as well for May. She acted in and directed a few movies, wrote some plays and screenplays, and got an Oscar nomination for her script for Heaven Can Wait. In 1987, she wrote and directed the mildly amusing desert comedy Ishtar, which starred Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman, and whose name has become an unofficial word in the English language meaning an overbudgeted, overhyped, big-star movie (last year someone dubbed Waterworld "Fishtar.")

Nichols and May have worked on little things over the years, and they've always remained good friends. But The Birdcage is their first major collaboration since they split in the early '60s.

For May, it's a return to the Hollywood fast lane, and at age 64, in a town that isn't terribly age or gender-friendly, she may be the most highly placed older woman who isn't a movie star. And for Nichols, who in past decades has always made at least one film whose subject matter took the pulse of the times, his work on a gay-themed comedy is another feather in the cap of a landmark commercial filmmaker.

IN A GRADUATE SCHOOL FILM CLASS, which is about as far away from reality as you can get without stepping into an alternative universe I remember someone defining camp as "a gay man's way of making sense of the world." I think his definition also applies to drag, which to the naked eye may seem like men wanting to "be" women.

But drag is an act of self-defense. It is, first, a way to have fun, which can literally be a life-saving activity for people taught by society to hate themselves. It's also a way-over-the-top parody of two things that heterosexuals hold sacred: Masculinity, to which all men aspire; and womanhood, which all men seek to conquer.

Nonetheless, from the standpoint of middle America, drag is also a safe way to imagine homosexuality because it's frivilous and usually nonsexual. Hence the popu larity of Priscilla Queen of the Desert and To Wong Foo, which kept gay men safely out of the bedroom unless they were putting on their panty hose.

There is, alas, little new ground broken in The Birdcage at least not in ways that really count. The fact that Nathan Lane's character has a life outside of a dress, and that he's in a 20-year relationship with a man who doesn't wear women's clothing, and that these two men raised a son together well, that's nice.

But in an interview before the movie's release, Lane promised that he and Robin Williams would transgress the great taboo of mainstream gaythemed movies: In The Birdcage, he said, he and Williams would kiss. They do not, except for a benign peck near the lips that made some people at a local preview of the movie laugh with a combination of nervousness and disgust.

That might not seem like a big deal, but tackling a good solid man-to-man kiss is the next big hurdle for mainstream gay-themed films and TV. If the culture is to grow, and if the movies are to take part in that growth, then sooner or later people's lives need to be shown with more fullness. Spike Lee does it with black films. More women are working in the cinema. But the stone wall of gay films has yet to topple in movies aimed at shopping-mall audiences.

On the other hand, you can't accuse Nichols of whitewashing a good deal else of his characters' lifestyles. The Birdcage is unapologetically flamboyant, with the couple's beefy Guatemalan housekeeper (Hank Azaria) flaming about the kitchen, and with many images of ample studs in teeny bathing suits rollerblading along the South Beach main drag.

The stereotypes are board and loving, the people good to each other and to strangers. Decide for yourself whether this invites understanding or throws gasoline on the fire. And though Nichols and May replace sexual intimacy with a combination of innuendo and tenderness between the married men, that's still a small step for ward, and the actors handle it nicely.

THE AUDIENCE IS ANOTHER STORY. The Birdcage is more sexual in its first half hour, so naturally that's when people stir and moan the most. Later on, when it gets more wildly comic, people begin to settle down. And when Nathan Lane comes out in full drag pretending to be Val's mother, laughter (of some sort) overtakes the simmering discontent.

May's script is tight and witty, especially its swift contemporary references that may not get laughs a decade from now (unless Bob Dole actually wins in November). Nichols' direction, somewhat slow at first, pick up speed at the madness grows. And The Birdcage is much more lively and colorful than the drab La Cage aux Folles, which takes place almost entirely indoors.

The actors all seem to know their characters well, and when they're on camera but not saying anything, you can enjoy their subtle glances and double takes. Williams, incredibly subdued for him, only seems to improvise once or twice; Hackman and Wiest are properly stiff but never ridiculous; Azaria, prancing about in cutoff short shorts and speaking a language that resembles English, practically lights the place on fire; and Baranski is handsomely melancholy, something she does well when she's not playing a bitch or a lush.

Only Lane, a stage actor whose most famous film role so far has been the voice of the meerkat Timon in The Lion King, goes over the top, but never so far that he falls down the other side. His character is the broadest, and Nichols knows just when to downshift the hysteria. Yet Lane's character will probably be the most acceptable homosexual in the movie because he's silly, emotional and wears women's clothing, which poses no threat to anyone.

The Birdcage is fun in patches, even if it doesn't quite sustain anything. It's as if Nichols thought the movie had to be tender and sweet or else people would be too homophobic to pick out its positive themes. And he's probably right: Nichols has a gift for knowing where the culture is at, even if he'd probably rather be a few steps ahead. It seems like the only time a gay movie character can wear jeans and a sport shirt is when he's dying of AIDS, and even then he can't get too physical. But eventu ally a filmmaker will just have to go for it and not worry about pandering to the crowd. If not a director as experienced as Nichols, with a star as powerful as Williams, then who?

Maybe next time.