Though it’s as modern as can be, there’s a touch of something Shakespearean about “The Wedding Banquet.” The plot, on paper, is just straight-up farce: Trying to solve a complicated set of problems, a lesbian agrees to marry her best friend’s boyfriend — but then his grandmother comes to town, intending to throw them a huge traditional celebration.
That premise is a 21st-century twist on Ang Lee’s 1993 queer classic, written by James Schamus. In that film, a Taiwanese American man marries his female tenant, rather than his own male partner, both to hide his real relationship from his parents and to help her get a green card. This version, directed by Andrew Ahn and written by Ahn and Schamus, gets more knotty, mostly because same-sex marriage is now legal in the United States, so the characters face a different series of snags. Both films explore how someone from a traditional Asian family navigates queer identity, highlighting the comedy and discomfort and discovery that result when cultures collide. But in this new “Wedding Banquet,” the focus shifts too.
In this story, Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) and Lee (Lily Gladstone) are deeply in love, living in the Seattle house that Lee inherited from her mother. Angela’s mother (Joan Chen) is an exuberant ally to Seattle’s queer community, in a manner so performative that it seems like she might be making up for something. The pair are feeling the strain as Lee tries to conceive through a second round of expensive in vitro fertilization. When it doesn’t work, they start to give up hope: They just don’t have the money for a third round, and Lee is beginning to wonder if her age has something to do with it.
Their lives are tightly entwined with those of Angela’s best friend, Chris (Bowen Yang), and his artist boyfriend, Min (Han Gi-Chan), who live in a guesthouse in Lee and Angela’s backyard. Min also happens to be the wealthy heir to a large corporation that his grandmother (Yuh-Jung Youn) expects him to run. He does not wish to do this. He could escape it if he had a way to renew his visa, and thus he proposes to Chris. But Chris is scared of commitment, and so Min, desperate to avoid his fate, concocts a plan.
Some of the pleasure of “The Wedding Banquet” comes from the wrinkles Ahn and Schamus invent in the story. There’s a kind of madcap energy to the first parts of the movie. Its premise is, admittedly, somewhat flimsy — surely there is a fix here that doesn’t involve a sham marriage — but for the movie to work, it must be married to characters that feel three-dimensional enough to support the rest of the film.
It mostly succeeds, though once in there’s some tonal whiplash. Occasionally it feels like “The Wedding Banquet” is a comedy script squashed into the form of an intimate relationship drama, like one of those slowed-down covers of a pop song that you hear in movie trailers. In a couple of pivotal moments, Yang’s S.N.L.-honed comedy chops can’t quite get off screen to make room for the necessary sincerity, leaving the sense that pieces of the scene are grating against one another.
But “The Wedding Banquet” is so charming, and then so unexpectedly moving, that its strengths eventually outweigh the bits of mess. Much of the credit is due several of the cast members, especially Gladstone, who is both centered and luminously funny, and Youn, whose version of this archetype we think we know — the no-nonsense Korean grandmother set in her ways — sparkles and surprises.
What’s strongest about the whole enterprise is Ahn’s sense for depicting relationships in which people understand one another without always saying what they mean. My favorite of his previous films is “Driveways,” a modest 2020 masterpiece about a young boy who moves in next door to a crotchety, lonely veteran and strikes up a friendship with him. In that movie, the boy’s mother is struggling with a series of mostly unseen issues, as is the neighbor. But as they cross that driveway that divides them, they start to find home in one another.
I thought of “Driveways” while watching “The Wedding Banquet,” in no small part because a literal driveway appears between the two homes in which the friends live, one they’re always crossing. Ahn’s retelling of the story ends in a hopeful place that feels indispensable for our moment, in which many people find their greatest comfort and daily strength in the families they have chosen to create for themselves. Familial love is never easy, whether or not genetics are involved. This tight-knit family has to learn that lesson, and in the end, we realize, they are far stronger for it.
The Wedding Banquet
Rated R for raunchy comedic moments and language. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters.
