‘The Wedding Banquet': Bowen Yang and Lily Gladstone Bring Back the Big Gay Rom-Com

Yahoo

28-01-2025

In 1993, before Ang Lee became the Oscar-winning director of films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and The Life of Pi, he made a delightful rom-com called The Wedding Banquet. The Wedding Banquet, co-written with Lee's longtime collaborator James Schamus, tells the story of a Taiwanese man living in New York with his boyfriend who decides to marry his female artist tenant. She needs a green card; he needs to convince his marriage-hungry parents that he's straight.
The film is a joy, but is, indeed, a little dated—and not just because it depicts Williamsburg in Brooklyn as an affordable place for poor artists to live. Queer life has changed in the decades since the film's initial release, so in turn there's a new version of The Wedding Banquet to reflect that evolution, which just premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Made by Fire Island director Andrew Ahn, the 2025 Wedding Banquet is an absolutely lovely film that is bound to make you weep happily as it explores the contours of found family and people just trying to do their best for one another.
Less a remake than a reinvention, this Wedding Banquet was once again co-written by Schamus, and immediately turns the original's concept on its head.
Lesbian couple Lee (Lily Gladstone) and Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) are attending a banquet held by a Seattle AAPI LGBTQIA+ group complete with a drag queen lion dancer. But neither Lee nor Angela are the guests of honor. Instead, it's Angela's mother, May (Joan Chen), a glamorous, overly enthusiastic ally, at whom Angela rolls her eyes.
Lee is trying to conceive via IVF, a process that's not going well, while Angela is grappling with her lingering feelings that she's going to replicate the complicated relationship she has with her own mom whenever the baby comes—should it come. Their saga is just one side of the equation that The Wedding Banquet cooks up.
Lee and Angela's best friends, gay couple, Minh (Han Gi-Chan) and Chris (Bowen Yang), live as their tenants in the backyard of the house Lee inherited from her dad. Minh and Chris have their own set of issues. Chris is commitment-phobic, even to his dissertation, which he's been putting off. Minh is an artist from a rich family living in Seattle on a student visa that's about to expire. His grandmother (Youn Yuh-jung) demands that he return to Korea and start working for their company.
Minh tries to propose to Chris who rejects him—Chris, who has a litany of insecurities, doesn't want to be the reason Minh loses all his money. So Minh and Lee come up with another idea. Minh will give Lee and Angela the money they need for another round of IVF and Angela will marry Minh to help him get his green card.
Sounds chaotic, no?
Well it is, especially when Minh's grandmother arrives with the intention of making Minh do a traditional Korean ceremony so newspapers back home can publish the photos. This sends everyone into an emotional spiral.
The movie has some glorious and ridiculous twists and turns that play for laughs, but its greatest asset is its subtle moments of understanding between the characters as they go on this absurdist journey together. Gladstone, in particular, has the unique ability to make you weep without saying a single word—her face is just that expressive—and Tran plays Angela like an open wound, especially around her mother. You can see her stunted maturity in the way she holds herself.
As important as the depiction of young gay life is to the idea of The Wedding Banquet, the driving force of both films is also the older people in their lives, who come with their own hang ups. Chen, who was spectacular in last year's Sundance hit, Dìdi is both a comic wonder as May, who is a little too into her status as PFLAG queen, and deeply touching as a woman compensating for her initial fears around her daughter's sexuality. You can see how she wears her allyship as armor, just like her fabulous clothes. (Her presence also feels like a nod to another pioneering gay rom-com, Saving Face, in which she also starred.)
And Youn, Oscar winner for Minari, subverts every expectation you have for the haughty wealthy grandmother. What initially might seem strident fades into a gentleness as she takes in her unfamiliar surroundings.
The Wedding Banquet has some hiccups. Occasionally it has moments that seem too self-referential for something as otherwise tender as it is. (Case in point: A Star Wars joke in the presence of former Star Wars actor Tran.) And there's a piece of backstory for Chris courtesy of his cousin, mostly played as comic relief by Bobo Le, that is underdeveloped. Perhaps most frustratingly the event of the title is a bit of a letdown as a set piece not as raucous as expected.
So while The Wedding Banquet may not replace Lee's version with its exquisite New York texture, it's still a canny update. You'll likely be wiping away tears by the end, but they are the cathartic, worthy kind we all could use right now. Ahn has devised a messy family worth celebrating.