In Fire Island, director Andrew Ahn and writer/actor Joel Kim Booster retrofitted Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, not just as a means to reflect the current moment, but to expand it in ways that were probably inconceivable in Austen’s time and imagination. Ahn has similarly transformative aims with his reimagining of The Wedding Banquet. He and the film’s original screenwriter, James Schamus, have retained the basic premise of Ang Lee’s 1993 version: a gay couple faces a crisis that, seemingly, only an ill-conceived straight wedding can solve. Now, however, instead of enlisting the help of a stranger, Korean immigrant Min (Han Gi-chan) identifies Angela (Kelly Marie Tran), the troubled best friend of his partner, Chris (Bowen Yang), as the ideal candidate to help put on a sham marriage for his traditional grandmother.
Angela isn’t just “the friend” — alongside Chris, she’s actually the second protagonist of this reimagination, an individual anchor to the story, with psychological hangups, immature foibles, and resentments all her own. It’s their shared anxieties about early-30s stagnation and an uncertain future that make Chris and Angela so well-suited to each other as friends and chosen family. That Angela and her partner, Lee (Lily Gladstone), who is struggling to conceive through IVF, happen to be Chris and Min’s roommates/landlords is as much a straightforward narrative function as it is a pretense for a more complex exploration of family composition and dynamics.
Ahn’s project is to hold a magnifying glass up to the disruptions of millennial life. In The Wedding Banquet, the biggest disruptors are blood relations and their insistence upon traditional benchmarks of family and fidelity. Min’s grandmother, Ja-young (Youn Yuh-jung), who wants Min to return to Korea to take over the family business, and Angela’s mother, May (Joan Chen), who’s public queer activism is an indirect way of making up for her failings as a mother during Angela’s childhood, pose formidable narrative and psychological obstacles to their offspring.
Rather than come across as enemies, Ja-young and May are quietly confronting their own perceived shortcomings, which Youn and Chen seem to tap into with effortless grace. They have access to inherent depth that the main quartet of actors rarely find throughout the film. Tran and Gladstone are bright spots, on occasion, though the former is burdened with explaining her inner conflicts more than she is tasked to express them, and the latter largely disappears from the film in the second half, such is the secondary nature of her character’s role in the plot. Meanwhile, Yang and Han, unfortunately, rarely shine. Except for a seemingly unplanned moment when Chris is sprayed with a hose, Yang’s performance seems shackled to a mode of expression and gesture that rarely deviates from unmodulated anonymity, while Han feels generally lost at sea amongst his more experienced castmates.
Even though it’s a glossy, star-powered dramedy, The Wedding Banquet fumbles opportunities to suggest that life is too complicated to be resolved in a conversation, even if characters avoid them as long as possible. Its modes are warmth and kindness, and they sit atop the film like a perfume, masking something less savory or impertinent. The film breezes past its existential questions, like familial resentment and anxiety over a disappearing future, as well as its more specific narrative turns, like a pregnancy from an unexpected source. They’re all answered in relatively simple terms, all neatly resolved by the end. Of course, this is the nature of the rom-com. The broad comedic swings coexist with the grand romantic gestures and the prickly personal dramas, and are all presented in neat, digestible forms. But in a film as blatantly, and admirably, concerned with reflecting a cultural moment that isn’t rigidly conformed to traditional notions of sexuality and family structure, it’s a shame the story’s rough contours couldn’t speak to it.
DIRECTOR: Andrew Ahn; CAST: Bowen Yang, Lily Gladstone, Kelly Marie Tran, Han Gi-Chan, Joan Chen; DISTRIBUTOR: Bleecker Street; IN THEATERS: April 18; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 43 min.
Comments are closed.