The Birdcage
1996Comedy · Farce119 min
A farce where the gay couple are the sane ones and the conservatives are the joke.
Robin Williams and Nathan Lane pretending to be straight, badly, for two hours.
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.
Also recorded
- Rotten Tomatoes — 81%, as recorded on Wikidata — Rotten Tomatoes has no public API, so this is the openly licensed figure rather than a live reading.
- TMDB — 7.0 out of 10 from 1,425 votes, refreshed daily.
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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.
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