Movie Night: The Birdcage

Mike Nichols’s 1996 comedy *The Birdcage* revisits farce as a social instrument, following a Miami nightclub owner and his partner as they try to present a conventional front when their son becomes engaged to the daughter of a prominent conservative politician. Adapted from the French stage and screen lineage of *La Cage aux Folles*, it reflects a moment when mainstream American cinema tested how openly it could portray a gay family. In New York, Nichols and Elaine May’s reunion also reads as a late-career echo of their earlier comedic partnership. Screening outdoors at Queens Botanical Garden, the film’s broad humor often lands hardest when it exposes etiquette as performance.