The American gay rights movement’s focus on marriage equality in the early 21st century wasn’t without controversy. For some, putting a premium on an arrangement so associated with heterosexual orthodoxy sold out the promise of gay liberation. Legally recognized unions represented to them an attempt to erase, not embrace, the differences within a community whose members had each other’s backs long before the federal government did.
Such conflicting views are highlighted in Andrew Ahn’s The Wedding Banquet, a film whose very title speaks to the nature of nuptials. The ceremony to which the film builds is flashy but also a façade covering up true acceptance for a coterie of queer characters. Leave it to Lily Gladstone’s Lee, an Indigenous organizer devoted to making youth of all sexual orientations feel empowered, to harmonize the opposing feelings about marriage. She’s less concerned about honoring the institution than she is with focusing on the event as a celebration of love.
As a filmmaker, Ahn is prone to turning narratives inside-out to expand who can see themselves reflected in them. Just as he shepherded Joel Kim Booster’s transposition of Pride & Prejudice onto a gay male retreat in Fire Island, so, too, does he think imaginatively with his adaptation of Ang Lee’s 1993 film The Wedding Banquet for a post-Obergefell world.
Working in tandem with one of the earlier film’s original co-writers, James Schamus, Ahn keeps the basic premise intact while updating the characters and their problems. Min (Han Gi-Chan) needs a green card to stay in America and ward off taking ownership of his family business from his stern grandmother (Youn Yuh-jung) back in Korea. But since his family still struggles with his sexuality, simply marrying his partner, Chris (Bowen Yang), would get him cut off from the family fortune. After identifying Chris’s college best friend, the codependent Angela (Kelly Marie Tran), as a potential wife, Min makes her an offer she can’t refuse by offering to pay for a round of IVF treatments for her partner, Lee, who’s struggling to conceive.
Hilarious screwball antics ensue as our protagonists attempt to sell their sham marriage to Min’s skeptical family. But The Wedding Banquet has more on the table than broad gags. The humor lands as if it’s coming not from the writers but through the characters by its grounding in the details of their lives. From the film’s cold opening that pokes fun at a sincere but deeply silly Pride event in Seattle, Ahn’s intent to send up the absurd incongruities of contemporary queer existence is clear. In the three decades since the release of Ang Lee’s original, the strides in gay acceptance have been so great in America that, perhaps inevitably, the most vocally prideful presence here isn’t a queer character but an ally: Angela’s mother May (Joan Chen).
These specifics accumulate from Ahn’s orchestration of his ensemble. He’s generous to the quartet of characters at the center of his film, and he finds natural ways to make them illuminate hidden sides of each other. The Wedding Banquet knows that the simplest way to generate sparks is with some friction, which is all too easy to find given that our four main characters live in close quarters at Lee’s family home. The film is as confident with a witty one-liner as it is with a comedic set piece, like the moment where Min and company quickly remove all queer paraphernalia from their house in advance of the surprise arrival of his grandmother.
When the ties between the central characters get messier as they buckle under the stress of selling their big lie, the film’s secret weapons emerge: Youn and Chen. As matriarchs who embody their generation’s ideas around fidelity and matrimony, they add dimensionality and perspective to the millennial malaise, and in ways that are heartfelt and never hokey. Though the breeziness to the proceedings comes at the expense of unlocking some deeper emotional registers, The Wedding Banquet’s sweetness never comes at the expense of its subversiveness.
This reimagining of Ang Lee’s classic ends in a similar place, yet Ahn makes the outcome land differently. He locates a point of reconciliation between families of choice common within the LGBTQIA community and families established by blood and marriage. Ahn doesn’t see assimilation and acceptance as forces that need to be placed in opposition.
During Min and Angela’s ceremony, no one seems to recall what a specific ritual involving tossing nuts and dates into a silk blanket means. When pressed, the party ultimately decides it’s not important to understand because they’d rather just move on in the festivities. A similar spirit animates The Wedding Banquet itself—namely, by not getting bogged down in symbolism and focusing instead on the humanity of its characters.
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