Times have changed since Ang Lee’s original Wedding Planner, an understated indie classic, introduced a bisexual Taiwanese immigrant, his long-term male partner and a fancy sham wedding designed to fool visiting parents. James Schamus, who cowrote that film, from 1993, also shares writing credits with the director Andrew Ahn on this muddled remake.
Relocating the action from San Francisco to cuddly, contemporary Seattle, The Wedding Banquet ties itself in knots to facilitate a phoney marriage in an LGBTQ-accepting environment.
Lee (Lily Gladstone) and Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) are committed, loving lesbians undergoing a financially ruinous second round of IVF. Angela’s college chum Chris (Bowen Yang) and his wealthy boyfriend, Min (Han Gi-chan), live in their garage.
Doors are mere metaphors in this arrangement, which allows the curiously sexless couples to wander in and out of each other’s dwellings and private moments. With similar blunt force, characters “speak their truth” in lieu of plotting. These farcical rhythms lend themselves to pitifully few jokes.
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Min, whose US visa is about to expire, is summoned back to Korea by his tycoon grandparents. He proposes to Chris, his boyfriend of five years, who declines, citing commitment phobia. He subsequently proposes to Angela with a green card in mind and a promise to fund Lee’s IVF. Before you can say “Huh?”, Min’s grandmother Ja-Young (Youn Yuh-jung, the Oscar-winning star of Minari) visits the quartet.
Ang Lee’s Wedding Banquet culminated in a beautiful moment when the protagonist’s father acknowledged his son-in-law with a traditional bridal envelope. There is no room for such nuance in the fluffy redo. Grandma immediately sees through the flimflam and orchestrates a lavish, traditional Korean wedding for the benefit of her homophobic husband. That character might have allowed for some drama and subterfuge, but he remains resolutely off-screen.
Technically, Wedding Banquet 2025 is a dog’s dinner. The camera shots and angles are eccentric; a simple two-shot conversation scene completely obscures one of the participants. A distracting amount of fractionally out-of-sync dialogue adds to the bumpy ride.
It falls to the charming cast to outshine the flimsy material. Gladstone and Tran are as warm and well-worn as a much-loved bed sweater. Bowen Yang thrums with millennial angst. Joan Chen steals scenes as Angela’s loudly gay-positive mother.
In cinemas from Friday, May 9th
