APRIL 5, 1996 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE 23

EVENINGS OUT

The Birdcage deftly avoids the point of gay lives

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Nathan Lane, houseboy Hank Azaria, and Robin Williams

by Mubarak S. Dahir

The Birdcage is a hysterical, occasionally moving adaptation of the French film La Cage aux Folles, in which a gay man's son comes home from college to announce his is engaged to the daughter of an ultra-conservative senator who would make Pat Buchanan look warm and fuzzy. When the future inlaws plan a visit, the son asks his father to get rid of a few obvious gay artifacts around the house-including the father's swishy lover, a man who has been like a mother to the boy. In this contagiously funny film, Robin Williams (playing Armand, the gay fa-

ther) and Nathan Lane (playing Albert, the lover) deliver two of the most memorable

performances to date of gay men on the sil-

ver screen.

prejudices by using slapstick to divert the focus of the movie at critical moments. Sadly, I have no doubt that the people who were laughing at odd times are the same ones who would go right back out on the street after the movie and call someone a fag.

A single movie is not going to change anyone's opinion on such a complicated social issue as gay rights. But this movie should have at least challenged our society's prejudices about how its gay citizens are treated. Instead, Albert was too often made to seem histrionic and ridiculous. What was truly ridiculous, however, was the son's cruel, selfish request that a man who spent twenty years raising and loving his partner's child

I hope straight viewers laugh at The Birdcage. I just hope they don't laugh it off.

Still, I wouldn't have thought you could fashion a movie like this and skirt the core issue of how gay people remain second-class citizens in this country. The makers of this movie, unfortunately, came pretty close.

Sure, Robin Williams and Nathan Lane end up saying just enough of the right "be nice to us fags" lines to make their characters credible. But in nearly every scene which deals with the fact that these two men love and are devoted to one another, the director chooses to interrupt potentially poignant moments with slapstick. Even scenes that would be better off played straight are broken up with easy laughs.

There's only one reason to do that, and it's not for the humor-this movie is crammed full of genuinely hysterical lines from start to finish. Unfortunately, the film's makers chose to rob the movie of a strong social message and instead put entertainment over substance for a sadly obvious explanation: Hollywood's obsessive fear over the bottom line.

This movie is marketed to mass audiences for big-ticket sales. (So far, it's been living up to those expectations, too. For the first four weeks of the movie's release, it has been the number-one box office hit across the country.) Its producers evidently feared if they sent out an overt message about fairness to gay people, they'd lose their mass-market appeal. So they soft-pedaled the social and political undertones in the movie, and instead opted for cheap laughs when things seemed to be getting too heavy. In doing so, they cheated the movie of what could have been some of its best moments.

I saw this movie twice, once in a suburban mall complex, and once in a big-city movie house. Both times, I was disturbed to find much of the audience laughing at inappropriate times such as when Armand and his son were telling Albert they thought it would be best if he wasn't around when the future inlaws arrived. But then, that's exactly what the movie was carefully calculated to do: allow a possibly homophobic (but ticketpurchasing) viewer to laugh off his or her

should be thrown out of his own home in order to accommodate a bigot.

Yet, the moviemakers never make you angry at the straight son. Indeed, they try to court sympathy for him, imploring you to feel badly that he might lose the woman he loves because he has gay parents.

In one of the funniest scenes in the movie, Armand is trying to teach Albert how to act so he can pass as straight. At one point, Armand screams in frustration "I'm trying to teach you how to act like a man!" Armand should have been screaming that at his son, instead.

Despite its flaws, however, this is a worthwhile movie that will undoubtedly make you laugh out loud-repeatedly. So I'm happy to see that so many straight people are going to see it. I want them to, and I want them to laugh. I just don't want them to laugh it off.

Mubarak S. Dahir is a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

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