The Birdcage is about a drag queen who hardly ever dresses in drag, believes in family values, and never touches his live in lover of 20-plus years. These plot points are essential to the movie’s commercial prospects; indeed, The Birdcage is going to make a lot of money because of its boundless hypocrisy. It preaches tolerance while having a good laugh at the expense of two mincing, shrieking, weeping male caricatures of women. It preaches understanding but refuses to show us any questionable sexual or physical behavior that might make understanding a bit more diffcult. The only consistent target of its animus is a politically conservative U.S. senator who is co-founder of a group called Coalition for Moral Order. It’s acceptable to dress up in women’s clothes and have pornographic statuary around your house, director Mike Nichols and screenwriter Elaine May are telling us; it’s quite another thing to oppose abortion and think women should stay at home with their children. Tolerance apparently has its limits.

Its most telling moment comes at the film’s climax, when the senator discovers that the matronly, ferociously right-wing housewife to whom he feels a strange attraction is actually a man in a dress. The two of them have just completed a long conversation over dinner about abortion during which the drag queen wonders why pro4ifers want to kill abortion doctors: “I say kill the mothers. After all, the fetus is going to get it either way, so why not go down with the ship!”