My daughter has been keeping an eye out for special screenings of older films, and Sunday, we went out to Tyson’s Corner to see Mike Nichols’ adaptation of La Cage au Folles, The Birdcage.

The film is a classic combination of crack timing, unrestrained joy, and comedic generosity. If you haven’t seen it (and it is currently on any number of streaming services, including Netflix), you are engaging in unnecessary self-neglect.

Since it is a well-known classic, I’ll just offer a few observations.

1. It is a crime no one was nominated from the picture. Not the uproarious Nathan Lane, the surprisingly canny Gene Hackman (who was just coming into his own as a comic force after the prior years’ Get Shorty), or the gut-busting Hank Azaria, the butler who can neither cook nor walk in shoes. Not even …

2. Robin Williams, who plays well-off character as the straight man, allowing Lane to fill the zany and manic spaces he normally occupies. Williams is the glue. Sure, he is funny, but he’s largely setting up everyone else, and in the rare moments of genuine drama (which are smartly short and tender), he packs a wallop.

3.  The set-up is ingenious. The daughter (Calista Flockhart) of a scandal-escaping conservative moral majoritarian senator (Hackman) falls in love with the son (Dan Futterman) of a gay couple who own and perform at a South Beach drag club (Williams and Lane). At the behest of the smitten son, Williams and Lane try to tone down their gayness and play as straight, conservative Greek diplomats (Williams the father, and Lane, the uncle) while entertaining the senator and his wife (Diane Wiest) for dinner. In the wrong hands, that same set-up could portend a preachy lesson-fest that has a few yuks, but Nichols (or rather, his longtime collaborator, screenwriter Elaine May) is having none of that. May is about the laughs and any zingers are broadly comic, more cultural than political, and woven tightly in the larger bit. Her bon mots never get in the way of the physical comedy, they enhance it.

Case in point.

Wonderful picture.