Critical response
The Birdcage received positive reviews on release. On the review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an 85% approval score, based on reviews from 65 critics, with an average rating of 7/10. The site's critical consensus reads: "Mike Nichols wrangles agreeably amusing performances from Robin Williams and Nathan Lane in this fun, if not quite essential, remake of the French-Italian comedy La Cage aux Folles." Metacritic reports a score of 72/100 based on reviews from 18 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
Film critic Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times awarded the film three stars out of four, writing that while the material will be familiar to those who have seen the original 1978 film or its Broadway incarnation, "what makes Mike Nichols'[s] version more than just a retread is good casting in the key roles, and a wicked screenplay by Elaine May, who keeps the original story but adds little zingers here and there ('Live on Fisher Island and get buried in Palm Beach - that way you'll get the best of Florida!')".
In his review for The Washington Post, Hal Hinson noted the film's subversiveness, commenting, "While politicians like Keeley talk a good game of family values, it's Armand and his nontraditional clan who have the stable home life. They are a family."
Desson Thomson of The Washington Post described the film as "a spirited remake of the French drag farce [that] has everything in place, from eyeliner to one-liner".
Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly called the film "Enchantingly witty".
In Variety, Todd McCarthy called the movie "a scream", adding, "Just as in their routines when they were a team in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Nichols and May are at their best with political and cultural humor. A reactionary politician is an easy target, of course, but the digs at Hackman's public image-obsessed senator are relentlessly clever and on the mark, as are the jibes at unscrupulous journalists. Final exchange of dialogue, involving Hackman's character, brings down the house in the manner of the famous 'nobody's perfect' line in Some Like It Hot." McCarthy concluded, "Lane has all the showy opportunities as the ultra-feminine Albert, and this outstanding Broadway star, little seen up to now in films, makes the most of them, mincing, pouting, posing and cavorting to hilarious and heartwarming effect. Although the gay lifestyles on display here are decidedly old school, the characters' underlying fierce pride, along with the piece's resilient defense of an alternative family structure, will win over all but the most doctrinaire political standard-bearers."
James Berardinelli wrote in ReelViews, "The film is so boisterously entertaining that it's easy for the unsuspecting viewer not to realize that there's a message here."
Janet Maslin of The New York Times gave the film a positive review, especially praising Williams's performance: "...this is one of his most cohesive and least antic performances. It's also a mischievously funny one: He does a fine job of integrating gag lines with semi-serious acting..."
In his review for The Advocate, Lance Loud commented, "Taking on the conservative agenda—more prevalent in our culture today than when the original film came out in 1979—The Birdcage goes beyond mere politics." He concluded that the film's "underlying feelings of compassion, tolerance, and understanding are this Bird's brightest plumage".
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