‘The Birdcage’, a remake of the French classic ‘La Cage aux Folles’, bears more than a passing resemblance to ‘Mrs. Doubtfire’. The difference is that here Robin Williams plays the straight man, providing the calm counterpoint to Nathan Lane’s wonderfully over-the-top, emotional performance as the star attraction at the Miami drag nightclub owned by Williams’s character, Armand.

The story gathers momentum when Armand discovers that his twenty-year-old son, Val (Dan Futterman), is engaged to the daughter of an ultra-conservative politician. Her father, played with great comic severity by Gene Hackman, is a right-wing senator and co-founder of the Coalition for Moral Order, whose public platform is built upon championing traditional family values. The young couple fear that the marriage will be derailed if Hackman discovers the flamboyant reality of Armand and his partner Albert’s domestic life.

The film is unmistakably a product of the mid-1990s. There are topical references to Bob Dole, then running for the US presidency, and even a joke at the expense of John Major, years before later revelations about political indiscretions would emerge. Watching it now feels like opening a time capsule of the culture wars of that era.

Mike Nichols cleverly reverses the premise of ‘Mrs. Doubtfire’. This time it is Nathan Lane who must masquerade as a woman, impersonating Val’s mother in order to convince Hackman’s deeply conservative family that everything is perfectly respectable. The resulting dinner-party farce provides the comic centrepiece of the film, with Lane’s increasingly elaborate performance fooling Hackman’s senator while Robin Williams struggles desperately to hold the deception together. There is also the delicious irony that Armand and Albert react with comic disappointment when they realise their beloved son is about to marry… a woman.

A further complication comes in the form of Val’s biological mother, played by Christine Baranski, who has played virtually no role in his upbringing yet happily agrees to become part of the increasingly absurd charade. Everything is carefully constructed to build towards the inevitable dinner party, where, naturally, almost everything that can go wrong does.

What the film does particularly well is expose the contrast between appearance and reality. Armand’s flamboyant household may look unconventional, but it is full of warmth, affection and genuine family feeling. By contrast, Hackman’s champion of ‘family values’ inhabits a world riddled with hypocrisy, scandal and moral contradiction, populated by politicians whose private lives are anything but exemplary. The supposed defenders of traditional morality prove considerably less functional than the family they so readily condemn.

Some critics argued at the time that, in making homosexuality palatable for mainstream audiences, the film softened its characters into colourful caricatures rather than fully rounded individuals. There is some truth in that observation. Even so, ‘The Birdcage’ remains an immensely entertaining comedy, elevated by two superb central performances and by its enduring message that family is defined far more by love, loyalty and acceptance than by conformity to anyone else’s idea of normality.