The Birdcage

A raucous remake of the French farce "La Cage aux Folles," "The Birdcage" is a funny film, with terrific performances by headliners Robin Williams, as an aging gay man, and Gene Hackman and Dianne Wiest as an uptight conservative couple he hosts at a dinner party while trying to act straight.

But the real scene-stealer here is Nathan Lane, a scream as Williams' longtime, flaming drag-queen companion.

The story is based on a singularly commercial premise — an aging gay couple pretends to be straight for the sake of the son they have raised together, who is about to marry into an ultra-conservative family.

Williams plays Armand, the older, more stable member of this duo, having fathered his son Val (Dan Futterman) during a one-night-stand some 20 years earlier.

And in this role, Williams performs with relative calm, allowing Lane, as the outrageous Albert, to run off with the picture. As the star of Armand's South Beach, Miami, gay club — called The Birdcage — Lane plays his squealing, cross-dressing, ridiculously insecure character to the hilt.

Audiences will especially chortle as Armand tries in vain to teach Albert to dine, converse and walk like a man, and they'll howl at the big, extended climactic sequence, during which Williams meets his future in-laws.

Hackman is an Ohio Republican senator, and co-founder of the Coalition for Moral Order, whose politics are somewhere to the right of Patrick Buchanan, if that's not off the scale. And Wiest is his easily flustered wife. Both actors are perfect, and their reactions only make Albert's big moment funnier, as he bursts into the dinner party in drag, claiming to be Val's mother.

The original French film, with hilarious performances by Michel Serrault and Ugo Tognazzi, was a huge success nearly 20 years ago — and for a time it wore the crown as the biggest moneymaking foreign film in American box-office history. (There were also two less successful sequels, followed by an American stage adaptation that became a hit musical on Broadway.)

Surprisingly, this new film is meticulously faithful to the original, right down to the smallest gags. And, yet, while the details are on-target, something vital is missing.

As directed by Mike Nichols ("The Graduate," "Heartburn," "Wolf"), "The Birdcage" has scenes that sag and . . . no pun intended . . . drag, padded with sentimental pap about tolerance, family values and laced with jabs at contemporary conservatism. In this context, however, they seem clueless.