Black Tie

Like La Cage Aux Folles, The Wedding Banquet seems like a natural to get remade or adapted every couple of decades, especially as norms change around what it means to be queer. The original The Wedding Banquet was released in 1993. It was directed by Ang Lee and written by Lee, Neil Peng, and James Schamus. It was the story of a bisexual man, a Taiwanese immigrant in New York, who has a male partner, but agrees to marry a Chinese woman to get her a green card, and to placate his traditional parents, who have no idea he’s gay.

Gay life has changed since 1993, and the new Wedding Banquet reflects that. The result is an enjoyable film, populated by likable leads, although it’s two older actresses (Youn Yuh-jung and Joan Chen), playing mothers, who steal the show. Andrew Ahn is the director, having written the script with original co-writer Schamus.

The very straight Ang Lee directed the original The Wedding Banquet and Brokeback Mountain, something that would raise a lot more eyebrows if it happened today. Ahn, the remake’s director, is gay, and previously made Fire Island, a Jane Austen riff about a group of gay men on the titular island that also co-starred Yang. He also made Driveways, an underseen 2019 drama that’s best remembered as Brian Dennehy’s final film.

There’s still a gay male couple, named Min (Han Gi-chan) and Chris (Bowen Yang), and Min is the heir to a Korean corporation, still with parents who don’t know and don’t approve of him being gay. He can marry his male partner and get a green card—not an option in the 1993 version—but not collect his inheritance from his family. But the film also adds a lesbian couple, Lee (Lily Gladstone) and Angela (Star Wars veteran Kelly Marie Tran), who are struggling to get pregnant via IVF. Also, the action’s moved from New York to Seattle.

The two couples are intertwined, with Min and Angela having dated in college, pre-coming out, while all four live together. The two couples eventually strike a bargain: They’ll carry on as normal, but Min will marry Angela, so he gets his inheritance, while she and Lee’s IVF will be paid for. But first, they have to put things past Min’s visiting grandmother (Youn Yuh-jung, who won the Oscar for Minari). We think it’s going to be a riff on The Birdcage, complete with a scene where they hide all the gay stuff in their house. But the grandmother, instead, sees through the ruse immediately.

Joan Chen, the Twin Peaks and The Joy Luck Club veteran who’s resurfaced the last few years in Didi, and the mini-series A Murder at the End of the World, also shines in a very different motherly role, as Tran’s mother, the sort of parent of a gay person who’s a vocal ally and never misses a drag show.

I liked all of the performances, starting with the two older women. Gladstone is outstanding as always, coming off her near-Oscar win for Killers of the Flower Moon, and it’s nice to see her in a relationship with someone who isn’t trying to poison her. Yang’s dialed down from every other time I’ve ever seen him, and proves a decent dramatic actor. A lot of remakes aren’t necessary, but this one’s an exception.