Review: Remake of Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet wastes no time divorcing itself from the original | Canada Voices

The Wedding Banquet

Directed by Andrew Ahn

Written by Andrew Ahn and James Schamus, based on the film by Ang Lee

Starring Lily Gladstone, Kelly Marie Tran and Bowen Yang

Classification PG; 103 minutes

Opens in select theatres April 18

Ang Lee’s 1994 dramedy The Wedding Banquet is a timeless, and deceptively simple, story of a queer Taiwanese-American man reconciling his seemingly conflicting identities. Andrew Ahn’s remake of the same name deliberately blends East Asian traditions with queer ones from the get-go.

This new film opens on a closeup of a Chinese dragon, which is then lifted away to reveal a dolled-up drag queen underneath. We find a lesbian couple, Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) and Lee (Lily Gladstone), in the audience of this LGBTQ+ benefit, where Angela’s mother, May Chen (Joan Chen) is receiving an award for “allyship” – much to her daughter’s chagrin. We follow the pair to a student showcase, where they link up with textile artist Min (Han Gi-Chan) and his boyfriend, Chris (Bowen Yang), a burnt-out academic whom Angela befriended in college (the drag performer, double-booked for the evening, pops out of a puppet again at the art show).

More a palimpsest than a remake, the film wastes no time scrambling and inverting the central dynamics of Ang Lee’s film, and Ahn – together with screenwriter James Schamus, who co-penned the original – adapts its emotional canvas to the present moment, spreading it across a broader ensemble. This narrative ingenuity works better on paper than it does on screen, but The Wedding Banquet’s endearing qualities largely outweigh its deficiencies.

The two couples live together in Lee’s family home; the men in the guest room out back, and the women in the main house. While Lee is on her second attempt at in-vitro fertilization, Min is stretching the limits of his student visa, and his grandmother Ja-Young (Youn Yuh-jung) obliges him to accept a “creative director” position at his family’s fashion conglomerate back home in South Korea.

Min had already bought the engagement ring, but Chris is understandably suspicious of the timing when his well-meaning boyfriend pops the question. Lee’s second miscarriage seems like an emotional and financial breaking point for the couple, until Min – on a half-drunk dare – proposes to Angela instead. He gets a green card, and they get the money for another IVF treatment. What could go wrong?

Min’s expectant grandmother shows up, unannounced, at the airport to meet her prospective in-law, and the characters scramble to de-gay the house before she arrives (Certain Women is removed from their shelf in a cheeky nod to Gladstone’s past roles). Where May Chen punctures expectations of parental figures with her performativity, the more reserved Ja-Young does so through quiet and canny observation. The subtle interplay between these complicated matriarchs is where the film’s considered approach to the pressures and compromises of family values is most pronounced.

Angela’s unconfronted antipathy toward her image-obsessed mother bleeds into her relationship with Lee. As Angela begins to doubt her own maternal aptitude, Chris’s underlying fear of committing to a life with Min runs parallel to her misgivings. The two couples are appreciably mirrored and counterposed: Min’s puppy-dog sincerity complements Lee’s grounding presence, while Chris and Angela – messy, flighty, afraid of change – feed into each other’s most childish impulses to amusingly unhinged extremes.

That said, Han (a relative unknown who fares well in a cast of celebrities) and Yang’s talents are aligned more with comedy, while Tran and Gladstone’s are better suited to drama, which makes for some bumpy shifts in tone when the characters drift toward their spiritual counterparts.

Conflicts emerge regularly – some more naturally than others – between partners, but they are just as quickly resolved in scenes that border on treacly, hampering the narrative’s breezily farcical flow. Ang Lee’s talent for fusing quotidian slapstick with small, revealing moments of intimacy gave his film a subtly expansive quality; toggling almost imperceptibly between levity and poignancy, the its comedy felt symbiotically related to its flirtations with tragedy. The same cannot be said of Ahn’s film, which too-frequently underlines the emotional urgencies of its scenario. Although it builds to several moments of quiet beauty, its sense of humour feels disappointingly sedate.

“Sometimes it’s important to be stupid,” says Min, wisely, at the midpoint, and it’s hard not to wish that Ahn’s ambitious film had taken this more to heart.

Special to The Globe and Mail