Time — or more specifically, the lack of time — is the recurring theme in director Andrew Ahn’s modern update of Ang Lee’s 1993 “The Wedding Banquet.” Lee (Lily Gladstone) is getting older and is running out of time to get pregnant, but In-Vitro Fertilization (IVF) is expensive and doesn’t seem to be working for her.
Min (Han Gi-Chan), having spent five years with his boyfriend Chris (Bowen Yang) in America is ordered by his wealthy grandmother to return to South Korea. He is desperate to extend his time in America by any means possible without being disowned by his conservative family. Out of desperation, Lee’s partner Angela (Kelly Marie-Tran) marries Min. He seeks to get his green card in exchange for the money that Lee and Angela need for a round of IVF.
Time works differently for queer couples, which is the ultimate driving force of the conflicts of the film. “If it happens, it happens,” Angela says to her partner about the two of them having a baby. Upset, Lee responds that “it doesn’t work like that for gay people!” She’s conscious of how much she’s already sacrificed in her attempt to become a mother. Queer people, by necessity, have always needed to be more intentional in pursuit of romance, especially in starting families.
This is a very complex concept for a romantic comedy to tackle. The result is that Ahn winds up sacrificing much of the film’s comedy in favor of the intense back-and-forth drama that feels out of place with the premise. There is not much time for any lightheartedness viewers would expect from a rom-com, as the movie is just under two hours, and six fights occur between both couples in that time.
As a result, when comedic bits do occur, they feel out of place with the rest of the film. With two couples to flesh out through the course of the film, there is also very little time to let emotions marinate properly. Ironically, the film’s major theme of running out of time is also one of its major structural weaknesses.
The character that suffers most from this is Lily Gladstone’s character Lee. She is the least fleshed out of the four leads, which is a problem when she makes a huge personal decision at the end of the film that is undeveloped and unearned. The audience is never invited to understand her beyond her desire to become a mother, which feels frustratingly surface-level and reductive. It’s also a shame because Gladstone is undoubtedly the strongest dramatic performer of the cast and would handle the script’s heavier moments the best, but Ahn only uses her sparingly.
But that does not mean there is no joy to be found in the performances on display here. Actress Joan Chen as Angela’s mother is the definite stand-out, as she plays a woman so desperate to make up for years of ignoring her lesbian daughter that she tries a little too hard to be an ally, pushing the point of overcompensation. This creates an interesting mother-daughter dynamic rarely seen in queer films, and it is one of the highlights of the film.
Similarly, actress Youn Yuh-Jung as Min’s impressive grandmother is nobody’s fool — she knows her grandson is gay, even if she doesn’t want to acknowledge it out loud. In a dynamic that will ring true for a lot of queer Asians who experience their family’s need to protect their reputation and save face, Min’s grandmother isn’t outwardly homophobic, but she does expect her grandson to hide his relationship in the shadows under the guise of protecting the family’s reputation. Over the course of the film, as she gets to understand Min’s life, she comes to understand how this mindset has harmed him resulting in the film’s sweetest moment, brilliantly acted by Youn.
However, despite the film’s strong cast of Asian actors, the film’s approach to Asian culture feels less developed. There is a Korean wedding ceremony midway through the film where care was clearly taken to make it authentic. Confusingly, several elements of Chinese culture are also tossed in haphazardly, which results in the film’s cultural background never feeling quite cohesive.
One of the best parts of Ahn’s previous directorial effort, “Fire Island” is how it captures a specific subset of queer culture and how Asian men navigate that space. But no such nuance exists in “The Wedding Banquet,” robbing the film of what could have made it truly unique. It is this inability to commit to a single lane, to not know fully what it wants to be that prevents “The Wedding Banquet” from performing as well as it could have.
Verdict: The film features a strong cast, but a lackluster script, resulting in a rushed film that never fully commits to exploring its character’s interior lives, or how they navigate messy conflicts, and cultural elements that don’t fully come together.
