The Birdcage (1996)

directed by Mike Nichols

Sarah Jae Leiber

I love my family, but we’ve never agreed on much, so it’s especially significant to me that we all love The Birdcage together as much as we do. Adapted from the stage musical adapted from the stage play La Cage aux Folles, the film stars Robin Williams, Nathan Lane, Gene Hackman, Diane Wiest, and Hank Azaria at the absolute top of their games. It’s the story of the daughter of a Republican senator who falls in love with the son of the owner and star of a Florida drag club and the series of hijinx that ensues to prevent the senator from discovering their true, homosexual, Jewish identities. It is a pure delight, sweet and silly and romantic and hilarious. It’s also one of two movies my family chose to watch together the night Robin Williams died (the other was The Fisher King).

My parents met at their eighth grade graduation, fell in love in early high school, got engaged at 21, and got married at 23. I was born just one week shy of my dad’s 25th birthday, and they had my brother two and a half years later. They raised us in a weird, wacky, and loving environment full of movies, TV, music, and Philadelphia sports.

I turned 25 in September and I am still a child. This milestone has made it so when I look back at my early childhood, instead of reminiscing, I find myself thinking of my parents at my exact age, holding a newborn that’s now their responsibility for life. I think about how scary that must have been, how much pressure for a person who’s still holding on to their kid brain to have a kid of their own. I often wonder how much I am like who they were when they were my age.

The Birdcage is my favorite comedy of all time because of its goodheartedness. Mike Nichols had an exceptional talent for finding sympathy without judgment, and for showing audiences exactly what’s great and special about an abject underdog (a Florida drag queen, a Staten Island girlboss, an aging starlet). The Birdcage manages to create a hysterical farce within the confines of a believable, memorable love story between two men, one that acknowledges the ridiculousness of those men without passing judgment on their lifestyle (no small order for a studio comedy made in the mid-‘90s). In the world of The Birdcage, it’s the things people do that make them silly, not the things they are.

My family is something of a bridge between the Keeleys (Hackman and Wiest) and the Goldmans (Williams and Lane). My parents are conservatives while my brother is politically undecided and I lean as far left as possible without falling off. We are Jewish, which is important to all of us. It also automatically others my parents in most conservative spaces, and me in the general sense of the world being kinda antisemitic. My mom loves Florida; I love drag performers.

I find it very hard to reconcile my parents’ politics with the values they raised me and my brother to uphold—even just the values they instilled into us by showing us The Birdcage several hundred times. Kindness, generosity, and acceptance are not necessarily values I align with the American Republican party and the political right in general. It’s difficult to separate the art from the artist in this case, and, frankly, maybe we shouldn’t. Beliefs are both things we do and things we are.

Part of the joke at the core of The Birdcage is the way it fumbles the definition of the perfect, unattainable, American nuclear family. As a white, conservative, Christian man and wife and their straight-haired brunette daughter, the Keeley family allegedly sits at the peak of that fantasy. With Keeley’s role as senator, the family also has significant, direct political power and far-reaching impact on the lives of people different from them.

The gag is that the people with the real power in the narrative are actually the Goldmans, the people whose existence the Keeleys believe represents the denigration of their sacred American life and culture. They’re who their daughter fell in love with, and they’re the more loving family between the two; one of the most meaningful moments of the movie happens when their son, Val, formally acknowledges Albert (Lane) as the mother who raised him.

The Birdcage isn’t as goodhearted when it comes to its conservative characters, nor should it be. Conservatism isn’t innate, like queerness; it’s not generational, like Judaism. It’s a choice. The Birdcage believes bad choices are open to mockery, and they are. But some of that mockery—like the bit about Senator Keeley’s colleague dying in the bed of an underage, Black sex worker, and his infamous last words—is made at the expense of marginalized people who don’t exist elsewhere on screen. We’re mocking hypocrisy here; in the main narrative, the Keeleys joining in matrimony with the Goldmans works because we get to know the Goldmans and know they are wonderful, three-dimensional people outside of the conservative culture war shouting their inadequacies to a captive audience. If the point was that the deceased, disgraced senator was also a political hypocrite, I wonder why a young, Black actress (Trina McGee) was chosen to represent hypocrisy on screen and not herself.

Ultimately, The Birdcage posits that family comes in all shapes and sizes, and that attempting to conform to the most unattainable American standard of living simply breeds resentment. None of these characters are perfect, but all of them love each other, and all of them want what’s best for their children—which is different from what has been prescribed for their children.

When my family and I laugh at The Birdcage, we’re seeing ourselves in the chaos. The narrative of our lives makes us look like the Keeleys, the white, traditional nuclear family with the 2.5 kids (my parents’ dog counts as a kid); our reality makes us a lot closer to the Goldmans, the Jewish entertainers flying by the seat of their pants to help raise each other. It took a village to make us all happen, including the efforts of grandparents and cousins and aunts and uncles, blood-related and friend-family alike.

In the moments where we’re disagreeing most aggressively, remembering The Birdcage reminds me that we’re all just constantly floating through the universe trying to heal and to relate to each other in the safest ways possible. My parents might have been young, white, and married when we were born, but they were far from the platonic ideal ascribed to generations of Americans who tried to do it all exactly right. They were babies raising babies, and my brother and I became babies who were raised by babies raising babies. But they love us, unconditionally, no matter who we are, no matter who we become. When I despair about their political beliefs (which is often), I remember how easily we all laugh at this movie together and realize that loving imperfectly is, actually, the only worthwhile way to love.

Sarah Jae Leiber is a Jewish culture writer, playwright, and screenwriter based in Astoria, Queens (although, crucially, she is from Philadelphia). You can find her work in Polygon, Bitch Media, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Jewish Women's Archive, and more. See her portfolio at sarahjaeleiber.com and follow her at @sarahjaeleiber.