‘The Wedding Banquet’ is a rom-com charmer with a modern twist
Bowen Yang, Lily Gladstone, and Kelly Marie Tran lead a stellar ensemble of queer characters
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Romantic comedies come in different levels of intensity. Some are a shout, some are a tap dance, and some are a swelling orchestral score. Between 2022’s Fire Island and his new film, The Wedding Banquet, writer/director Andrew Ahn has found his particular rom-com frequency—ensemble comedies that seemed poised to explode into screwball madness but instead unfold as gently as a whisper. Ahn has rightfully received a lot of praise for anchoring his romances around the underexplored queer Asian-American experience. But he deserves equal praise for bringing a dose of grounded humanity back to the genre too.
While Fire Island retold Pride and Prejudice through a contemporary queer lens, The Wedding Banquet pulls from material that’s a little more recent. It’s a remake of Ang Lee’s 1993 film of the same name, which follows a Taiwanese New Yorker in a committed gay relationship who decides to sham-marry a woman to please his conservative parents and help her get her green card. Lee’s film has its own gentle, delightfully progressive touch. So rather than remake it beat-for-beat, Ahn and co-writer James Schamus (who also worked on the original) just riff on some of the same ideas in a 2025 context.
Here there are two Seattle-area gay couples in the mix: Reserved scientist Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) and her more self-assured partner Lee (Lily Gladstone), who are in the middle of trying to have a baby through IVF. And their friends/tenants Chris (Bowen Yang), a lost PhD-student, and his excitable puppy dog of a boyfriend Min (Han Gi-chan), who are at a crossroads of their own. Min hails from a successful Korean business family, who want him to give up art school and return home to work at their company. Without family support for his visa, Min’s only way to stay in the U.S. would be to marry a citizen. And since Chris is too afraid of commitment to say yes to his proposal, Min comes up with a different idea instead: he’ll fund Angela and Lee’s next round of IVF if Angela agrees to marry him.
It's a bit of a convoluted set-up, even more so once two family matriarchs get added to the mix: Angela’s supportive mom May (Joan Chen) and Min’s imposing grandmother Ja-Young (Minari Oscar winner Youn Yuh-jung), who flies in from Korea to oversee the wedding. There’s enough plot here to fill at least three screwball comedies and no shortage of niggling logic questions at play. (If Min has so much family money at his disposal, why are he and Chris living in Angela and Lee’s cramped shed-turned-guesthouse?) But Ahn is so disinterested in histrionics that it’s easy enough to roll with the goofy contrivances. Ahn seems to view plot not as something that drives a story, but as scaffolding from which to hang a bunch of thoughtful, funny character observations.
That leads to some delightful zags on how you might expect this sort of story to unfold (especially for those who have seen the original). Ahn and Schamus make some particularly smart choices about how to update the story’s older generation for this current moment in time. May, for instance, is a supportive PFLAG mom who’s hilariously aghast at the thought of her daughter marrying a man. Yet her loud-and-proud support for the queer community is in many ways its own shield from the emotional accountability that her daughter truly wants from her. Ja-Young, meanwhile, has a sharp eye for how her grandson’s life mirrors her own; how the restrictions she felt as a young woman growing up in Korea aren’t just limited to her generation and gender. Ahn understands the thorny, unspoken dynamics of families who repress rather than process. And Chen and Youn anchor the film with their beautiful portrayals of older women with great wisdom but also great flaws.
The younger cast, meanwhile, all offer variations on the sort of ennui so many millennials feel as we age into our mid-30s—still clinging to a sense of youthful freedom even as we’re reluctantly pushed towards adult milestones. (Not unique to our generation, surely, but we’re the ones there now.) The foursome have megawatts of charisma between them. And if none of the younger characters feel entirely three-dimensional in isolation, they add up to a portrait greater than the sum of its parts.
In his first English language role, Han is an absolute comedic scene-stealer—giving Min an ebullient himbo charm with just enough hints of depth to make him feel like a real person. And, for her part, Gladstone gets a welcome chance to step outside the heavy dramatic work that’s defined so much of her career (including her Oscar-nominated turn in Killers of the Flower Moon) and play a funny, modern woman. Though her character is the least fleshed out of the group, there’s moving subtext about why a Native woman might be especially pulled to have her own biological children.
Tran and Yang are the film’s central focus, however; Ahn’s dueling avatars of millennial indecisiveness and platonic codependence. This is as much a friendship comedy as it is a romantic one, and Tran and Yang have a lovely sense of lived-in chemistry together. That said, if The Wedding Banquet has a weakness, it’s that Angela and Chris’ anxieties lack a touch of specificity. Conflict avoidance is a hard thing to dramatize in a comedy, which leaves the characters feeling just a touch flat, even as Tran and Yang do emotive work to fill in their emotional lives. Still, what The Wedding Banquet lacks in depth, it makes up for with its empathetic worldview and breezy, understated comedic tone.
Like Lee’s original film, Ahn’s take on The Wedding Banquet is ultimately a celebration of family—whether born, found, or some combination of both. Ahn sees life as a patchwork quilt with space for all sorts of different relationships. And he’s made a film so gentle and cozy, you’ll want to wrap yourself up inside it.
Grade: B+
The Wedding Banquet is playing in theaters nationwide as of today.
Other stuff I’ve worked on lately: As Daredevil: Born Again wraps up, I’m kicking off weekly reviews of Doctor Who for Episodic Medium and The Last of Us for The A.V. Club. I also compared the new Blumhouse movie Drop to the underrated thriller Red Eye and wrote about the Resident Evil franchise for this month’s Women of Action column. Plus I reviewed the Netflix weepy The Life List and did a little check-in on Disney’s latest live action princess trend.
Lovely review! I saw this last night and I'm just glad Andrew Ahn is making movies.
https://letterboxd.com/ghostwritingcow/film/the-wedding-banquet-2025/
I love Ang Lee and The Wedding Banquet, so I cannot wait to watch this!! thanks for the review