An Unapologetically Queer Rom-Com With A Great Ensemble Cast

It’s common knowledge that our society has such a long way to go before truly, fully normalizing and accepting people of color and queer artists and narratives in the mainstream. Yet despite the continuing struggle, it’s important to recognize just how far minorities in cinema have come, and how enduring these films continue to be. As evidence, filmmaker Andrew Ahn’s remake of “The Wedding Banquet” just premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and the movie marks a milestone of sorts in POC and queer cinema. As Ahn told the premiere screening’s audience, he first saw the 1993 Ang Lee version of “The Wedding Banquet” as a child thanks to his mother renting it one night during a trip to the video store, telling her son that she wanted to see the movie about Asian-Americans that all the white people were watching.

As Ahn confessed, viewing that film at a young age was a formative experience, as it helped him start to define his own sexuality in an era when it was only just becoming permissive to be publicly out of the closet. Now, 32 years after the original film, Ahn has teamed up with one of the co-writers of Lee’s film, James Schamus (whom Ahn worked with as a producer on his 2019 breakout film, “Driveways”), in order to update “The Wedding Banquet” for an era that’s far more permissive than the ’90s were in some ways. While the ways in which the 2020s are still rooted in antiquated tradition and prejudice makes up part of the film’s plot, its exuberance and matter-of-fact approach to queerness and sexuality allows this version of “The Wedding Banquet” to be a delightfully novel experience all its own.

The original “The Wedding Banquet” is a comedy of errors, involving a bisexual Taiwanese man who makes a deal to marry a Chinese woman in order to get her a green card and appease his traditional parents, only to discover that his parents are coming to the USA for their sham wedding, which means he has to lie about his homosexual relationship. As Ahn observed in his introduction to the film, legal same-sex relationships and marriages have been a reality for decades now (and let’s hope they stay that way), so that couldn’t be the only hurdle the characters would face in his version of the film.

As such, this “Wedding Banquet” introduces us to Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) and Lee (Lily Gladstone), a loving lesbian couple living in Seattle, who are desperate to have a child via the expensive IVF procedure. Their gay male friends who live in their guest house, Chris (Bowen Yang) and Min (Han Gi-chan), are undergoing a rocky patch in their relationship, with Chris refusing to commit to Min based on knowing that Min’s wealthy, traditional Korean family would disown him if they were to marry. Upon learning that Lee’s last IVF treatment didn’t take and that the couple don’t have enough money to pay for another try, Min hatches the plan to marry Angela, based on the fact that her day job could allow her to pass as a straight woman in the eyes of his grandmother (Youn Yuh-jung) long enough for a sham wedding to occur and Min to give Angela and Lee money for a new procedure.

Of course, things get complicated almost immediately: Min’s grandmother insists on coming to Seattle to stay with Min and Angela, Angela vocalizes her uncertainty about becoming a mother due to her rocky relationship with her own mother, May (Joan Chen), and Chris is torn between his love for Min and his sense of responsibility. The farcical icing on the wedding cake comes when Chris and Angela, who were briefly an item in college before they identified their sexuality, sleep together as the result of a drunken crashout.

Events only get more comically tangled from there, and what “The Wedding Banquet” proves more than anything is how much of a knack Ahn has at setting up and paying off situational comedy. It’s a trick easier said than done, as evidenced by the numerous romantic comedies which pile on contrivance after inanity and expect to be rewarded with relatable laughter for it. Ahn, Schamus, and the ensemble cast all have the innate understanding that stories like this need to feel real even while presenting a series of improbable circumstances, and “The Wedding Banquet” pulls off that trick with panache.

While “The Wedding Banquet” is at its best when leaning into its rom-com spirit, it falters when Ahn chooses to slow things down to try and inject some indie dramedy into the proceedings. This is probably due to the fact that Ahn and Schamus are attempting to balance the heightened, farcical nature of their story with dialogue that is way too on-the-nose to ever sound naturalistic. The actors are asked to deliver some really clunky lines, stating their problems, complaints, and desires in a fashion that could never sound realistic no matter who was saying them. It’s the sort of dialogue that would fit snugly into a ’80s or ’90s TV sitcom, but stands out like a sore thumb here.

Ultimately, this feels like a crossed-wires situation when it comes to aims and tone. “The Wedding Banquet” is, at its core, light entertainment, and there’s nothing trivial or slight about that. Yet it’s understandable why Ahn might feel the pressure to try and give the film more weight than it can handle, and it only half works. When it comes to moments shared between Chen and Yuh-jung, the history and wisdom these women innately have lends their scenes an extra poignancy. By contrast, the verbosity of the young couples feels out of place; it’s hard to reconcile their too-perfect speeches one minute with their messy social fumbling the next.

Fortunately, the ensemble cast are so winning (both separately and together) that any of these issues become mere bumps in the road on an otherwise delightful path. Part of the joy of the film lies in the way that Ahn has structured each character to work in multiple pairings, and it’s a stroke of good casting that every last actor more than lives up to the script’s requirements. It’s such a joy to see these performers bounce off one another, and together they create the found family dynamic that Ahn is striving for with the film. When “The Wedding Banquet” is leaning into its rom-com roots, it sings in a way that most modern rom-coms haven’t for a good long while.

That’s why this film, even more than recent hits “Anyone But You” and “Crazy Rich Asians” (the latter of which this movie is bound to be lazily compared to), feels like the best example of a resurgence of the romantic comedy. I’m sure that there have been other strong showings on streaming services lately, but there’s something so special about having a collective experience with a film like this, and hopefully it could lead to further films like it not only being made but being released theatrically. “The Wedding Banquet” may be the feel-good movie of the year, but that’s not to call it a frivolity. It’s a film that, once again, demonstrates how all of us, no matter from what background, can relate to each other, and in the era we’re currently suffering through, that’s a message we could all use more of.

/Film Rating: 8 out of 10

“The Wedding Banquet” premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. It opens in theaters on April 18, 2025.