THE WEDDING BANQUET – Review by Lynn Venhaus
A modern re-imagining of Ang Lee’s first 1993 breakthrough film, The Wedding Banquet is a funny, charming queer family romantic comedy about personal growth, making a home, and your chosen family becoming your real family.
Hoping to stay in the country, a gay man Min (Han-Gi Chan) proposes a green card marriage to a female friend Angela (Kelly Marie Tran), and in exchange, will pay for her partner’s IVF treatment. However, things soon get complicated when his grandmother surprises them with a visit. She wants an extravagant Korean wedding banquet.
It’s safe to say some of society’s attitudes have changed towards more acceptance of same-sex couples in the three decades since Lee and his screenwriter James Schamus imagined a green-card marriage between a gay bride and groom, noting marriage equality and LGBTQ rights have progressed in 32 years.
This remake has many things it wants to say through writer-director Andrew Ahn, who also teamed up with Shamus for this version. Ahn, an L.A. filmmaker whose previous film Fire Island also starred Bowen Yang, was a summer vacation rom com inspired by Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.”
The cast is all aces-high, with Joan Chen as Angela’s mom, Minari Oscar winner Youn Yuh-Jung as Min’s grandmother, Oscar nominee Lily Gladstone as Angela’s partner Lee, Emmy nominee Yang as Min’s boyfriend Chris,Tran and newcomer Chan endearing characters you can relate to through a modern lens.
As the two same-sex couples, Tran, Gladstone, Yang and G-Chan nimbly play complicated Millennials and give us enough genuine emotion to make a connection.
Lee, the Taiwanese filmmaker who has won two Oscars for directing Brokeback Mountain and The Life of Pi, was considered a legitimate talent after his The Wedding Banquet was both Oscar-nominated and won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, the first of his two (no one else has achieved that). It was also his first film to release theatrically in the U.S.
Fast-forward to today, and the Ahn-Schamus American remake collaboration still concerns cultural friction and a sham marriage ceremony — only it’s South Korea and not Taiwan as the immigrants’ home country, they’ve shifted the action from New York City to Seattle, and they’ve increased the involved couples from one to two.
Min and Chris have been in a five-year relationship and live in the garage of their good friends Angela and Lee, who live in Lee’s family home. They would like a child and have tried IVF twice with Lee. Angela doesn’t want to carry the baby, for she has an overbearing mother, and she frets about what kind of parent she’d be. Chris and Angela became good friends in college.
Min has family money, but his grandmother Ja-Young is not happy with his reluctance to join the family business – a multinational corporation, and with his student visa about to expire, is making demands.
As played by the wonderful character actress Youn Yuh-jung, who won an Oscar as the grandmother in Minari, steals every scene she’s in, and will also break your heart as she reveals confidences to her grandson. After all, Yuh-jung has five decades worth of film credits.
The characters could all easily have been one-note, but the performers provide unexpected layers, while also crowd-pleasing with broad laughs. OK, it may be cliché, but the scene where they “de-queer” the girls’ home is very funny, especially when Yang is shown taking down a framed Lilith Fair poster.
While one can easily predict “all’s well that ends well” after mishaps and complications arise, yet there are some sweet surprises that await.
The Wedding Banquet may have some clunky moments, awkward baggage, and appear not svelte enough in its execution, but one can feel its sincerity, its concern over Asian-American representation, and appreciate its lovable cast.
The Wedding Banquet opened in theatres April 18, and is rated R for language and some sexual material/nudity.
