5 hours Ago By Bilge Ebiri
“We can get gay-married, why would we want to get fake straight-married?” So observed The Wedding Banquet director Andrew Ahn at the world premiere of his film at the Sundance Film Festival. He was trying to explain why he chose this of all movies to remake. The 1993 Ang Lee classic (co-written by James Schamus, who also has a writing credit on the new one) was about a Taiwanese immigrant landlord marrying his mainland Chinese tenant to get her a green card while trying to hide his gay boyfriend from his newly arrived parents.
That does make it a tricky story to adapt today: The original retains its charm and fascination — and, thanks to Ang Lee’s direction, its artistry — but can feel like a time capsule. (One that reminds us just how much progress has occurred over the past several decades, and that such progress can be reversed by those consumed with cynicism and hate.) In updating The Wedding Banquet for today’s attitudes, Ahn wisely focuses on the small group of close friends at its center.
They serve as a kind of surrogate family for Angela Chen ( Kelly Marie Tran ), whose girlfriend Lee ( Lily Gladstone ) desperately wants to have a baby, while her best friend Chris ( Bowen Yang ) still doesn’t know what to do with his life or with his artist boyfriend Min (Han Gi-chan). That’s not to suggest that Angela is estranged from her actual family: Her mother May (Joan Chen) is an extremely public, bordering on performative, ally of the Seattle gay community, constantly hosting events and winning awards for her support. It’s a fresh twist on the familiar overbearing immigrant-parent trope.
In the film’s opening scene, set at a fancy awards banquet, May suggests to Angela that she get makeup tips from a drag performer onstage. Later, she blurts out that Angela and Lee are trying to have a baby. Even this ostensibly progressive, with-it mother retains the singular ability to embarrass her child.
The true silliness gets rolling when Min, whose family owns a huge corporation in Korea, is informed by his stern grandmother (a very good Youn Yuh-jung ) that he must now run one of the companies they’ve just bought or be forced to return to Korea. Min has zero interest in joining the family business. Hoping he can both make his bond with his boyfriend official and get the green card that will allow him to stay, he proposes to Chris.
When commitment-phobe Chris immediately rejects the idea, Min turns around and proposes to Angela as well. Although Angela is reluctant to do any such thing, Min’s offer comes with the money to pay for one last round of IVF treatments for Lee — so she agrees, out of both love and desperation. Then, Min’s grandmother suddenly shows up in Seattle to oversee the festivities, at which point our heroes’ zero-effort, zero-consequence sham-marriage plan becomes something else entirely.
This is sitcom-level stuff, and the film doesn’t try too hard to make its narrative machinations particularly novel or realistic. Ahn clearly understands that playing everything fast and funny can help paper over problems of predictability and contrivance; he doesn’t give us time to poke holes in the film’s admittedly thin narrative. And even though we can foretell just about everything that will happen in The Wedding Banquet — every plot twist, every screwball complication — we don’t much mind, because the comedy is so brisk and good-natured.
Jutting up against all this levity, however, is an entirely different tonal strain: the film’s extended bouts of sincerity. In a lot of mainstream comedies, any occasional earnestness comes off as shallow, a bit of cheap heft to elevate the goofiness. For all its slickness, The Wedding Banquet avoids this common Hollywood trap.
When its characters open up to one another, these moments are sturdy and heartfelt. Ahn started his career making sensitive, restrained dramas like Spa Night and Driveways , and despite the fast-paced, colorful antics of The Wedding Banquet , the director clearly retains enough of the spirit of his earlier work to fill his characters’ quieter exchanges with emotional authenticity. The veteran actresses Chen and Youn are particularly strong here, each playing with and against the stereotypes associated with their characters.
Can such disparate elements coexist? Mostly. The seriousness can sit uneasily against the broad comedy, as the viewer gets whipsawed between emotional realism and farce, but it’s a pleasant kind of whipsawing. We usually know what will happen next on a story level, but we can never quite anticipate how the movie will make us feel about it.
The Wedding Banquet , which will open theatrically on April 18, is a messy film, but it’s also a winning one. It may not be perfect, but who wants to complain when they’re having fun?.
