There is a wonderful symmetry to “The Wedding Banquet” (Universal), showing now at the Montrose Playhouse. One of the gay couples is male, the other female; both have one larger-than-life, older, female relative (mother/grandmother); both have one partner with an overwhelming desire to engineer a life-changing event (marriage/IVF); both are mixed-race; both have one partner who is not exclusively gay; both have one partner who is unable to express their emotions—which, in turn, leads to both couples having quarrels about small things. The filmmakers mine this vast quarry of material deeply, lovingly creating a sharp, focused, tidy film with very broad audience appeal.
The disciplined symmetry of the screenplay allocates the six main characters enough attention during the industrious development of the plot. All six are described well enough to appear sufficiently rounded, whole, genuine. It is a film which combines, mixes, rearranges. There is no time wasted: we need one character to make sense of the other five—there is no fat to be trimmed.
Min (played by Han Gi-chan) is Korean, his partner, Chris (played by Bowen Yang) is Asian-American. Min has not told his ultra-wealthy grandparents that he is gay (“my grandfather is the biggest gay-hater in Korea”), but, on the other hand, he is desperate to marry, not least because he needs a “green-card” residency-permit to stay in Seattle, where the film is set. Chris isn’t sure: he’s indecisive, leaving graduate school to guide birding-tours and sketch what he sees in a tiny notebook. For some reason, the guys live in the girls’ converted garage.
Lee (played by Lily Gladstone), is Caucasian, and Angela (played by Kelly Marie Tran), is Chinese-American. They want to have a baby by artificial insemination, but we quickly wise-up to the fact that this is a higher priority for Lee than for Angela. The procedure keeps failing, and they don’t have money for another attempt. Angela’s overbearing mother wins prizes and makes speeches, lapping up the praises of all-and-sundry for being the perfect mother-of-a-lesbian. There is more than a hint of “mirror, mirror, on the wall” in mother, played somewhere between comedy and grandiosity, and making it all about her, by Joan Chen.
And so, we arrive at a point where Min has more cash than he knows what to do with, but can’t marry Chris; meanwhile, Lee is short of the money she needs for another pricey round of IVF. Min comes up with a cunning plan. Instead of Chris, how about he marry Angela, receive his green card, stay in the closet with his grandparents, and pay Lee’s medical bills. From here, the combinations and possibilities multiply, the comedy intensifies, and the twists whirl around, powerfully shifted up a few gears when Min’s wealthy grandmother (played by Youn Yuh-jung) unexpectedly arrives to meet the female fiancée, quickly putting two-and-two together, “what is going on here?” and going on to shock Min by correctly pointing out (in Korean) that there is no way he is sleeping with Angela.
The famous “law of unintended consequences” is used with impressive subtlety in “The Wedding Banquet.” There is air between the ideas that arise. The film doesn’t crudely force its humour on us, like a sledgehammer. Instead, the potential pitfalls of the increasing confusion are avoided entirely by creating exceptionally sharp edges between scenes, as if perfectly cut afternoon-tea sandwiches at an expensive hotel. Darkness moves to daylight, inside to outside, one couple to the other—thus maintaining forward-momentum and keeping focus. At no point did I feel that I had “missed something.” Take the very first such scene change in the movie. A riotous, noisy dance with a drag queen in a gay bar cuts acutely to a buttoned-down, cheerless awards ceremony in a fancy hotel.
The decision to bring Grandmother over from Korea is especially fruitful, introducing a second act at around the half-way point, as if in a theatrical play. We see how the weight of expectation, prejudice, and reputation, hangs over Min (“you don’t work for the company, you are the company”). We also see how extreme financial inequality risks corroding his loving relationship with Chris. Grandmother asks the right questions, but also in the right way. She is asking to understand and re-evaluate, rather than to judge. Once again, the film treads lightly: much of this part of the story is told with complete silence—grandmother is reflecting while, say, scrubbing the sink or folding napkins. One absolutely exquisite shot (late in the film) is from grandmother’s perspective as she just watches the girls outside in the driveway from a window. We watch the scene and also watch her observing without getting involved.
There is so much to enjoy in the film—as well as the music, listen carefully for the soundscapes in the background: birdsong, soft traffic, music from a nearby nightclub, all at just the right volume and edited in perfectly.
The comedy is used frugally, carefully, in a targeted way: “You, you look gay!” “She’s not insane, just American.” “Korean people are very good at talking.” “My own daughter—marrying a man!” “This is all very hard on my ego.” The humour is the opposite of scattergun—it builds symmetry by providing ballast to the film’s more serious themes. The characters are given space to be themselves, not overwhelmed by cliché or empty-calorie one-liners that they would not, actually, say. It is very much not a film about the characters’ egos, it is about their individual voices. The interior-lives of all six characters are at once utterly authentic, super-interesting, and composite. The 1993-original (this film is a remake) is the work of a first-rate writer, Ang Lee, perhaps most famous for “Brokeback Mountain” (2005), about two cowboys who fall in love. He writes complex gay-relationships with clarity, tenderness, and love. “The Wedding Banquet” incisively tackles how inherent subtleties of culture brush up against inevitable subtleties of sexuality. As this immensely rewarding film hums along, it raises questions about how to meander through a relationship of distance, where two people have different dreams, and when there is an ever-present risk of running out of time.
Adam Poole
10 May 2025
If you are interested in viewing this screening, please book your tickets here
