The Birdcage

The Birdcage is the 1996 remake of the French comedy La Cage aux Folles, from 1978, given 1990s Hollywood comedy treatment, and directed by Mike Nichols with middling results. The film is about two gay men named Armand and Albert (Robin Williams and Nathane Lane) who run a popular night club in South Beach, and their son, Val (Dan Futterman), the product of Williams’s singular attempt at heterosexuality. His real mom (Christine Baranski) has kept her distance from him, so the flamboyant Albert (whose popular drag persona “Starina” is a regular feature of the night club) is more like a mother to him. The film is about the mad comic hi-jinks that ensue when a gay couple tries to act straight for their son’s future in-laws, a Conservative senator (played by Gene Hackman) and his wife (Dianne Wiest).

Mike Nichols often botched comedy. Working Girl, which is touted as a classic of the 80s, never really catches fire. The Birdcage gets quite funny late in the game, but not before a series of drawn-out scenes of Armand and Albert essentially breaking up and getting back together repeatedly. (Albert becomes such a cliché that he’s totally irritating until the final act, when he steals the show.) Nichols has done good work, but his comedies have never really worked. Nichols, perhaps because he began his career with “important” films like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, never found that lightness of touch that seemed a second language to the great comedy directors like Preston Sturges. Nichols’s conception of comedy is to go grandiose: Working Girl is a yuppie Cinderella. Postcards from the Edge comes closest to this lightness of touch, but it never stops straining for prestige long enough to be fun and relaxed. Even Nichols’s greatest film, The Graduate, never worked as a comedy for me: it always felt too wistful and tinged with longing and regret to be taken as a joke, no matter how hip it might have been in 1967.

The Birdcage isn’t wistful or tinged with longing, nor is it particularly hip: It’s desperately trying to be, but its conception of gay people is narrow and dated now: They’re all flamboyant emotional time bombs. Robin Williams’ character is the most reserved of the bunch (he has surprisingly few Robin Williams-y moments, and they’re short enough that they amuse rather than pander to us), and it’s strange to see him underplaying here, although it’s admittedly refreshing.

Where The Birdcage both falters and succeeds is in its casting. The cast is so good—not just Williams and Lane but Gene Hackman, Dianne Wiest, Hank Azzaria as the sassy, aged-out but still tight Guatemalan houseboy, and Christine Baranski—that Nichols basically coasts on their talent. He doesn’t bother to shape the scenes, and thus the movie lies there like a wilted mint leaf under the draining Florida sun.

Some of the film’s brightest moments involve senator Hackman’s attempts to cover up his colleague’s scandalous death: The two of them served on some high-minded morality committee, but his colleague has just dropped dead in a hotel room where he was spending the night with an under-age black prostitute. The film is perceptive about hypocritical moral values and how they prevent people from really seeing each other with compassion and humanity.

Finally, in the last act, The Birdcage picks up steam. Albert, who’s been asked not to attend the dinner of the two families because of his gayness, emerges in full drag pretending to be Armand’s wife, and fools everyone. It’s a tour de force performance and this extended scene almost achieves the comic lunacy of the great screwball comedies The Birdcage partly imitates. 

The Crucible

At times, the 1996 film version of The Crucible feels merely a notch above a History Channel re-enactment of a day in the life of the Puritans. But then, especially as the film develops, and the complexities of the characters from Arthur Miller's play swirl together in an increasingly murky dish of passion, wrath, desire, and vindictiveness, you find yourself pulled into the spectacle of it and taken hostage by the performances of Daniel Day-Lewis as John Proctor and Winona Ryder as Abigail Williams and Joan Allen as Elizabeth Proctor.

We so rarely get operatic drama anymore, that there's something deeply comforting about the way The Crucible shatters us emotionally. Daniel Day-Lewis masterfully shows us a man tormented by his own guilt but equally convinced that the authorities in his community are utterly insane fools, at best, and abusive dictators at worst. The tension builds and builds until the thing lies bleeding before us, and it's a deeply affecting experience. We've achieved what the Greeks all along told us was the purpose of tragedy: catharsis. 

And of course, Crucible is a really fun ensemble piece. Everyone gets to play dress-up, do their best cocktail of Anglo-Colonial accents, and shout beautiful, intense prose from the rooftops. It's delicious, it's powerful, it's touching, especially when Joan Allen weeps into her husband's shoulder, "Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me," as the music swells, or when Abigail leads the other girls in their hysterical accusations of witchcraft, and the camera actually moves and twists, as though Sam Raimi's demon-camera in Evil Dead has temporarily invaded this play. The more the film lets loose, the more wonderful it all is.

Directed by Nicholas Hytner. The screenplay was adapted by Arthur Miller, who doesn't shy away from the bleak ending, thus letting his criticism of the ignorant and stupid mob mentality of both the witch trials and the Red Scare remain as stinging and powerful as ever. With Rob Campbell, who does good work as the beleaguered witch-hunter Reverend Hale, Paul Scofield as the imperious Judge Danforth, Bruce Davison as the cowardly Reverend Parris, Jeffrey Jones as Thomas Putnam, and Charlayne Woodard as Tituba, the Barbados slave.

Escape From L.A.

At some point during the film, one character says to another, "this is insane!" To which the former replies, "that's the point." That brief exchange is a pretty good summation of John Carpenter's Escape From L.A. (1996), which is far more of an exercise in ridiculosity than its predecessor, the slick, moody urban action thriller Escape From New York. Kurt Russell returns as Carpenter's most memorable anti-hero, the eye-patch wearing, John Wayne-esque Snake Plissken.

Escape From New York was set in 1997. L.A. is set in 2013, and the U.S. is now ruled by the religious right to the point that the president, a fundamentalist Christian, has been allowed to alter the Constitution so that he can be President for life. His daughter, in a quasi-Patty Hearst move, rebels against him by stealing a device that could shut down all power sources across the globe. Then she trots over to L.A., which, after a massive earthquake separates it from the contiguous United States, has become the new dumping ground for America's undesirables (atheists, Muslims, criminals, people who cuss, etc.). There she meets up with the gangster who runs L.A., a former Peruvian terrorist named Cuervo Jones (Georges Corraface).

Did I mention that the president's daughter is named Utopia? Did I mention that Snake Plissken rides a tsunami into the streets of L.A. along with an aging surfer who's played by Peter Fonda? (Perhaps being really laid-back is a moral crime bad enough to warrant exile in Los Angeles.) Did I mention that Escape From L.A. is just about the craziest movie in the history of cinema? Or at least of the 90s.

You really can't do anything but cheer for a movie that so proudly pursues insanity as the order of the day. You get the sense that this is not simply John Carpenter cutting loose. This may be the official moment when Carpenter just stopped giving a shit. (Although some of his previous work might suggest otherwise.) But despite that decidedly double-edged compliment, I'm actually trying to laud the man for showing us such a hacky, cheesy, singularly wacked-out good time. Carpenter, who wrote the script with Kurt Russell and Debra Hill (both of whom produced the film), has always had this kind of B-movie sensibility. But his B movies (aside from the 1974 Dark Star) had a sort of polish to them, mostly due to the fact that Dean Cundey was his DP from Halloween to The Thing. L.A. eschews that polished look, whether accidentally or on purpose, and we get something altogether different. (The special effects are laughable, but somehow mesmerizing.)

I did wish that the female characters were more interesting. Utopia is kind of strong, and there's a girl with some pluck who tries to help Snake early in the film, but she's dispatched rather quickly. You long for Adrienne Barbeau to show up and show 'em how it's done. Pam Grier does make a flashy appearance as a transvestite. (Her voice has been altered, but it comes off as a stupid machination. Grier's real voice is commanding, and it's a shame we don't get to hear it as it is.) There's also a pretty colorful role for Steve Buscemi as a weaselly "agent" who still tries to get work in the new, disheveled, post-Hollywood L.A.

With Stacy Keach, Cliff Robertson, Valeria Golimo, Bruce Campbell (in a funny turn as the Surgeon General of Hollywood, who removes attractive features from people and transplants them onto the freakish faces of patients who've already had too much plastic surgery), Michelle Forbes, A.J. Langer, Paul Bartel, and Robert Carradine. ★★½

From Dusk Till Dawn

George Clooney gives a dynamic performance as a professional thief who's on the lam with his crazy brother (Quentin Tarantino). They're headed to Mexico, and on the way they meet up with an ex-preacher (Harvey Keitel) and his two teenage kids (Juliette Lewis and Ernest Liu). The fugitives take the family hostage and make it across the border, stopping to kick back and drink at a seedy bar. But soon they realize the place is crawling with vampires. From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) is a paean to exploitation horror and action films, and it certainly delivers the goods. But you can feel writer Quentin Tarantino and director Robert Rodriguez patting themselves on the back for their cleverness, and after a while it becomes mind-numbingly repetitive. With Tom Savini, Fred Williamson, Salma Hayek, Cheech Marin, John Saxon, and Kelly Preston. 108 min. ★★

The First Wives Club

This movie is one of my guilty pleasures. It's uneven and really, considering the sheer quantity of talent involved, it's a bit of a letdown. Based on a novel by Olivia Goldsmith, it's about three college friends (Goldie Hawn, Diane Keaton, Bette Midler) who reunite years later after they've been dumped by their husbands for younger women. Their plan for revenge soon evolves into one where they can channel their frustrations for good. The movie is some kind of rah rah feminist picture, and yet it has moments where it completely contradicts itself. The women spend a lot of time praising their own abilities to beat their lousy ex-husbands into submission, but at the end, when one of the grumpy husbands utters, "you can't do anything to us," they acquiesce that no, they cannot, but the people they have under their control (all men) have the ability to get results. It's a strange moment of inconsistency. The movie itself is a bit formulaic, complete with the montage toward the end where the three leads, frustrated with how things are going, spend the duration of a mushy 90's pop ballad walking with their heads down, consoling themselves with family, and having a good cry. The movie wants to be brassy and gushy in the middle, but I'm not convinced it can have it both ways.
Director Hugh Wilson doesn't always stage scenes the way he should. There's a scene where they sneak into Midler's ex's apartment, and it's built up like something out of a bad spy thriller, with the three comedians screaming and pushing and shoving and freaking out in histrionic fashion. The scene is big but it feels big in a contrived way--factory made comedy with a director's attempt to manage the audiences' reaction.
The talent rescues the movie from its shortcomings. The three leads are too much fun to watch to completely dismiss The First Wives Club, and the supporting cast is to die for: Maggie Smith, Eileen Heckart, Sarah Jessica Parker, Stockard Channing, Dan Hedaya, Victor Garber, Stephen Collins, Marcia Gay Harden, Bronson Pinchot, Elizabeth Berkley. 1996