The Wedding Banquet: Rom-Com Remake Retains Some Rom, Loses the Com
By Karen Gordon
Rating: C
On paper, The Wedding Banquet looks like a sure thing.
It’s a remake of director Ang Lee’s 1993 movie of the same name, which was nominated for an Oscar in the Foreign Language film category. Its creative team includes two Oscar-winning actors, a beloved Saturday Night Live cast member, and the multi-Oscar nominated co-writer of the original.
It looks like exactly what I need right now: an easy-going, warm-hearted romantic comedy with a light touch. Alas, while this is clearly a sincere attempt to give the classic original a deserving remake, the film never finds its comedic footing and ends up being a bit of a slog.
The Wedding Banquet is set in Seattle’s gay community. Lee (Oscar winner Lily Gladstone, Killers of the Flower Moon) and Angela (Kelly Marie Tran, Star Wars: The Last Jedi) are in a long-term relationship. Lee yearns to be a mom and has been undergoing IVF treatments. Unfortunately, the procedures haven’t resulted in a successful pregnancy.
She doesn’t have the money on hand for another try and worries that even if she can find the cash, her age will work against her. For her part, Angela is willing to support her, but is ambivalent about motherhood, and has other wishes for the two of them.
Then there are their friends and tenants Chris (Bowen Yang, Wicked, SNL) and Min (Han Gi-Chan, Pandora, Beneath the Paradise), who are also in a long-term relationship, and who live in the pretty raw (a.k.a. uninsulated) shed in the back of Lee and Angela’s house.
Min is from Korea, raised by his wealthy grandparents who have an internationally successful business, and expect him to return home when he’s finished his studies to take it over. And as his student visa is about to expire, that day has come.
His grandmother, the serious Ja-Young (Oscar winner Youn Yuh-Jung, Minari) wants him home, and although she doesn’t rule with military precision, she isn’t entertaining his resistance.
Min now has two problems. He doesn’t want to go back to Korea, and his grandparents don’t know that he’s gay, which he assumes they would find unacceptable. Min desperately wants to stay in Seattle and so proposes marriage to Chris. For myriad reasons, Chris is not swept up in the romance and freaks out… and not in a good way.
And so, to help Min out, Angela reluctantly agrees to a green-card marriage. And in return, Min — who everyone discovers is rich — will fund Lee’s next IVF treatment.
The two plan to do a quick city hall wedding. But when Min tells his grandmother about the marriage, she unexpectedly shows up in Seattle, to throw them a proper Korean-style wedding.
The other major character in this scenario is Angela’s extroverted mother May Chen (Joan Chen, Twin Peaks), who shows her support for Angela as an out gay woman. Turns out she’s a bigger fixture in the gay community than her daughter. That creates more friction between the two than you’d imagine, although the problems feel too engineered.
So, we have here is the attempt to make a screwball-esque comedy, with each character having a serious enough dilemma to create interpersonal problems, and a compelling reason to stay connected while the action plays out. There are plenty of opportunities for comedy. But they mostly fall flat.
Director Andrew Ahn, who co-wrote the script with the Oscar-nominated writer-producer James Schamus — and who was a co-writer of the original 1993 version of the film with director Ang Lee and Neil Peng — loads the film down with dilemmas for each of the characters.
The actors commit. Each character has a well-defined problem that they’re working through, but it overloads the movie which sometimes, like the tension between Angela and her mom May, feels more manufactured than genuine.
As well, there are some puzzling basics. Like why Min and Chris, neither of whom are hurting for cash, live in a tiny, unfinished, apparently uninsulated shed in Lee and Angela’s backyard. And why are neither Lee nor Angela bothered by their very good friends living that way?
You could argue that this weird living arrangement is meant to be quirky and yet another opportunity for comedy, but if so, director Ahn never finds it. And that is true of too much of the film.
There are a lot of moments that are quirky, but the film never quite finds the right comedic rhythm. Things that should feel funny rarely rise to make us chuckle, and too often the film, which does have a genuine warmth, falls flat.
The Wedding Banquet. Directed by Andrew Ahn, written by Andrew Ahn and James Schamus. Starring Lily Gladstone, Kelly Marie Tran, Bowen Yang, Han Gi-Chan, Youn Yuh-Jung, and Joan Chen. In theatres April 18.