Rom-com 'The Wedding Banquet' gets a thoughtful makeover

One would have hoped our society had progressed beyond the need for a remake of director Ang Lee’s 1993 breakthrough hit “The Wedding Banquet.” The premise of a second-generation Taiwanese American in New York City marrying a female friend so that she can get a green card and he can fool his parents into thinking he’s straight — much to the chagrin of his boyfriend — should be charmingly obsolete these days. Alas, recent events seem intent on reminding us that we’re never quite as far along as we think we are, and Lee’s beloved farce gets a thoughtful 2025 makeover from director Andrew Ahn, who finds a few fresh angles on the old story while mining the material more for melodrama than comedy. It’s a touching, warm-hearted movie that probably could have used a few more laughs.

Working with the original picture’s co-screenwriter James Schamus, Ahn expands the first film’s triangle to a tale of two couples. Kelly Marie Tran and Lily Gladstone star as Angela and Lee, lesbians living in a big, heavily mortgaged house that’s supposedly in Seattle but feels like something out of Armistead Maupin’s San Francisco stories. Angela is a nerdy research scientist short on social skills while Lee is an Indigenous community organizer aching to have a child, but the two of them can’t afford another round of expensive IVF treatments.

Living out in the garage/guest house are grad students Chris (Bowen Yang) and Min (Han Gi-Chan). Chris had a fling with Angela during freshman orientation, back before both of them figured a few things out about themselves. Min, who was raised by his tough, staunchly traditional grandparents in South Korea, will soon be heir to a massive business empire. He’d much rather stay in America and pursue a career in the arts with Chris, but his student visa is about to run out.

So, in the kind of plan that can only be hatched after a late night of drinking and dancing at the club, Min offers to pay for Lee’s IVF treatments if, in return, Angela agrees to marry him. That way he gets a green card and his grandparents off his back, and they can all keep living happily ever after together in their big Armistead Maupin house. The only catch is that Min’s grandma, played by Oscar winner Youn Yuh-Jung, wants to come for a visit and meet the bride before she’ll give her blessing.

This leads to some mild slapstick as the quartet frantically attempts to “de-gay” their domicile, and just when we’re settling in for a wacky, role-playing burlesque a la “La Cage aux Folles” or “Three’s Company,” Grandma throws everybody for a loop. Using the same impeccable timing with which she stole 2020’s “Minari,” Youn takes one look at these four and asks, “Do you think I’m an idiot?” That’s when things get interesting.

Ahn’s previous picture was 2022’s “Fire Island,” a wild and raunchy “Pride and Prejudice” riff that Disney subsidiary Searchlight annoyingly shunted straight to Hulu. (“Gay Jane Austen” is such a slam dunk of an idea, I’m shocked it had never been done before. The film was part of a proud tradition of gay rom-coms that Judd Apatow and Billy Eichner’s “Bros” obnoxiously pretended to be inventing a few months later.) “The Wedding Banquet” is a more muted affair, closer in temperament to Ahn’s lovely 2020 “Driveways,” a tale of neighborly kindness that relied on quiet close-ups of his astonishing actors doing their thing.

The biggest surprise at this “Banquet” is Bowen Yang, whose smug “Saturday Night Live” persona is nowhere to be seen in the picture. (I don’t think I’m alone in finding him insufferable on that program.) Yang played the most buttoned-up of the revelers in Ahn’s “Fire Island,” and proves again here that he’s really quite winning when working in a lower key, playing straight man — pardon the term — to the chaos around him and striking a warm romantic chemistry with co-star Han. Gladstone isn’t as adept with the film’s early, comedic scenes, but her intensely empathetic presence pays off when things get mushy in the later reels.

Kelly Marie Tran made a big splash as an adorable sidekick in “The Last Jedi,” after which she was chased off social media by the world’s most well-adjusted and not-at-all psychotic fanbase and rudely written out of the action in “The Rise of Skywalker” by cowardly producers trying to appease Comic Con cretins. (Ahn gives Tran a pretty good in-joke here when her character is revealed to be blissfully ignorant of all things “Star Wars.”) Given this history, there are few performers I’d more enjoy seeing go on to a superstar career, so it pains me to report that Tran is really rather bad in “The Wedding Banquet.” To be fair, it’s not a flattering role. Like the son in “The Birdcage,” Angela is required to be angry and unreasonable about everything to keep the plot machinery going. But Tran settles into petulance without ever finding another gear. She’s tiresome.

Ahn has much better luck with the older actresses. Youn wanders deadpan through the picture with a permanently cocked eyebrow, aghast at these Americans and their insistence on oversharing their sloppy feelings. (Sometimes all the movie needs to do is cut away to her and you’re already laughing.) But the show is stolen outright by Joan Chen as Angela’s excitable, smothering super-mom, a woman entirely without boundaries who is hell-bent on being the best ally she can be, no matter how much that might embarrass her daughter. Chen became an icon in the ‘80s for her aloof, exotic beauty, but between this and her luminous turn ripping farts in a car during last year’s “Didi,” I’m very much enjoying her career resurgence as a comedienne.

Like so many queer stories, “The Wedding Banquet” is about how families of choice fill in when the ones you’re born with let you down. Lee’s version was an elegantly constructed farce that deepened as it went along, while Ahn’s lunges for the heartstrings early and often. The 32 years between films might best be measured by the hilarious exasperation with which Chen’s character cries, “After all this, my daughter is marrying a man?”

“The Wedding Banquet” opens in theaters on Friday, April 18.