Mike Nichols is a great director who doesn’t often put a foot wrong. His relatively lean body of work includes Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, The Graduate, Silkwood, Postcards From The Edge and, most recently, Closer. Nichols, like Ang Lee, jumps genres with ease and creates intelligent, satisfying films. The Birdcage, his slick update of La Cage Aux Folles, isn’t his best film, but it was far better than most of its mid-Nineties multiplex contemporaries, and it contains Robin Williams’ best big-screen performance.

Williams plays Armand, the owner of a South Beach Miami nightclub. His lover Albert (Nathan Lane) performs there nightly as drag superstar Starina. (Exactly what’s so amazing about Starina’s act is a little hard to work out, but her audiences seem to love her, and she has her name in lights out the front. To me, she just lunks around the stage singing hoary old standards and telling one-liner double entendre that wouldn’t be out of place in Are You Being Served.) Albert suspects that Armand is sneaking out to have an affair while she performs, but the boy he’s with is his son, Val (Dan Futterman) who’s just become engaged. Armand doesn’t want his twenty-year-old boy to get married, and especially not to Barbara Keely (Calista Flockhart), the daughter of arch-conservative Senator (Gene Hackman). But Val won’t budge, and soon, the Kelly’s are on their way to visit their new in-laws. Problem is, Val’s fiancé has told her parents that Armand and his “wife” are cultural attaches, and a fine, traditional married couple.

The Birdcage copped a lot of flak from censorious gay commentators who felt that Lane’s over-the-top Albert/Starina was the latest in that long line of “negative representations”. This negative representations crap misses one vital point: a lot of gay men are flamboyant, over-the-top, queeny. There’s a guy who drinks at my local who wears embroidered Chinese slippers and calls everyone “daaaaaaahling” at the top of his voice in a brassy Australian accent. Ever heard of Quentin Crisp? Negative representation ideology (NRI) laments the fact that some gay guys have fruity, pre-AIDS personae, and, in this way, NRI is self-embarrassed and slightly fascist.

Also, what NRI-practitioners are missing in this case is The Birdcage's comment on masculinity and marriage in general. Gene Hackman’s ramrod straight he-man is every bit as laughable as Lane’s queeny Albert as both swing a little bit too far from the centre for their own good. Senator Keely tries too hard to fit into societal expectations, and so does Albert, performing as an entertainer for everyone’s enjoyment, a role for queeny gay guys that seems to make everyone else comfortable with them (see also: Carson Kressley). The Keely’s strained marriage shows off the masks and limitations of the nuclear family, but then, so does Albert's role-playing, folding socks and calling himself Val’s mother. When Senator Keely dresses in drag, he looks just as uncomfortable without his macho mask as Albert looks when he drops his femme mask and tries to act like a “real man” for the in-laws. But as usual, most of this is lost on gay film commentators and gay activists, who are trapped in the vice of their outdated, simplistic ideology.

Anyway, Lane shines in a great role, as do the rest of the cast, especially the hilarious Dianne Weist as the Senator’s wife, a woman whose sweet, navy-suited exterior conceals hard ambition and a racist, ruthless edge. Even Calista Flockhart does okay, and Christine Baranski, who looks slightly canine, plays a very sexy career woman. Hank Azaria, a voice from “The Simpsons” and the husband of Helen Hunt is great as Guatemalan houseboy/drag wannabe Agidor.

But the movie ultimately belongs to Williams, who keeps his improvisation under tight control (oddly, given Mike Nichols co-invented American improvisational comedy – maybe Williams was nervous on the set) except for one hysterical scene where he telescopes the history of American popular dance into one thirty second montage. Williams’ Armand is a gutsy and warm guy who stands by his man.