A Cagey Look

I recently saw the movie The Birdcage for the first time. A multi-star cast of Robin Williams, Nathan Lane, Gene Hackman, Dianne Wiest, Hank Azaria, and (before anyone really knew who she was) Calista Flockhart appear in this comedy about a gay man in committed relationship who agrees to "play it straight" to con the conservative parents of his son's fiancee.

In a nutshell, this is a killer finale with a lengthy prologue. The entire movie is one big buildup to the "big dinner" in which the families meet, and everything preceeding it is just so much filler, wasting time on a too slow burn to get there.

The thing is, once the movie does get there, it proves well worth the wait. The cast brings the funny big time, with one laugh out loud moment after the next. Nathan Lane in particular steals the show, and when you consider that he's stealing it from professional ham Robin Williams, it's a true accomplishment.

But even as the movie seems to have a quiet message to look past prejudice, it engages in more than a few cheap stereotypes along the way. The movie does ultimately satisfy, and yet it's hard not to look it as a 22-minute episode of a really good sitcom stapled on the back of an hour-and-a-half of largely uneventful, unfunny blather. It's an A short film grafted onto the end of a C (or worse) feature length one. Which I suppose averages out to something like a B.

See it expecting less than perhaps I did, and I think you'll probably enjoy it.