“Your grandfather is expecting a wedding, are you all stupid?”
In 1993, director Ang Lee (who would win the Oscar for Best Director for 2005’s “Brokeback Mountain” and 2012’s “Life of Pi”) submitted his second film in what he recently referred to as his “father don’t know what to do” trilogy to the prestigious Berlin International Film Festival. It was a Taiwanese romantic comedy called “The Wedding Banquet” that was one of the first mainstream movies to tackle queer relationships, and it won the festival’s grand prize of the Golden Bear, becoming Ang Lee’s breakthrough film. It subsequently received Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for Best Foreign Language Film. Later in 2023, the United States Library of Congress inducted the movie into the National Film Registry for being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” to the landscape of American cinema. It is one of only 900 films to have ever been given such an honor.
When I heard that director Andrew Ahn would be remaking the film in collaboration with the original’s co-writer and producer, James Schamus, I was skeptical but optimistic. “The Wedding Banquet” had quickly become one of my personal favorites from Ang Lee (and in general), so I had rather high expectations. I sat down to see the movie at the 44th edition of the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival (MSPIFF), and was pleasantly surprised by how it tried to modernize the core concept, while giving it a fresh coat of paint at the same time.
The plot follows two queer couples, a lesbian couple named Angela (played by Kelly Marie Tran, who was in 2017’s “Star Wars: Episode VIII — The Last Jedi”) and Lee (played by Lily Gladstone, star of 2023’s “Killers of the Flower Moon”), as well as a gay couple named Chris (played by SNL star Bowen Yang, who was in 2024’s “Wicked”) and Min (played by Han Gi-chan). Min is an art major at a Seattle university who is hiding his sexuality from his conservative South Korean family. He is also the heir apparent to a large fortune from a chaebol, which his grandmother Ja-Young (played by Youn Yuh-jung, who won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for the 2020 Best Picture nominee “Minari”) oversees. When he realizes that his student visa will expire soon, he decides the best course of action is to enter into a green card marriage.
Angela and Lee have been trying to have a baby through several unsuccessful rounds of in-vitro fertilization (better known as IVF), but the medical bills are too high for them to continue. Min proposes to them that, in exchange for Angela’s hand in marriage, he will financially support them for the foreseeable future. They all agree to the wacky idea, but Angela and Chris have a bit too much to drink at her bachelorette party and they accidentally sleep with each other. The plan is further complicated when Ja-Young decides to attend her grandson’s wedding and insists on a traditional ceremony to appease her husband, where all hell breaks loose.
As someone who loves the original “Wedding Banquet,” I noticed a large number of similarities between the two movies, and some notable differences. The original had only one gay couple and the bride was a straight undocumented immigrant, with her family out of the picture. In this version, the ceremony takes from Korean culture instead of Chinese and Taiwanese customs, and the bride’s mother May (played by Joan Chen, star of the 1989-2017 show “Twin Peaks” and Ang Lee’s 2007 film “Lust, Caution”) plays a far more supportive and involved role in the plot. The surprise pregnancy comes into play in the remake far earlier than in the original, and Ja-Young is a combination of both the grandmother and the grandfather from the original. Both movies still end with a character stretching their arms up triumphantly, and feature a rather hilarious scene where the characters are forced to “de-queer” their houses.
I feel that the core idea of a queer character being forced into an elaborate fake wedding to hide their sexuality from their family worked better in the ‘90s back when gay marriage was still illegal. The remake does a fine job of making the idea believable, but it feels more forced than in the original. Having a second gay couple, while more creative, can make the plot feel a bit overstuffed at times.
Unlike most modern remakes, this film manages to justify its own existence by changing up the formula and modernizing the film to fit into modern queer culture. It has a lot of laughs and is well worth your time, although I prefer the 1993 version. My final rating for the 2025 remake of “The Wedding Banquet” is a lovely 8/10.