‘The Wedding Banquet' Review: A Farce With Feelings

Wall Street Journal

17-04-2025

Ang Lee's 1993 film 'The Wedding Banquet' starts from a gag premise. A Taiwanese man living in New York is in a gay relationship but still closeted to his parents, who are pressuring him to marry; to appease them and help a poor Chinese woman get a green card, he agrees to legally binding (if romantically fraudulent) nuptials. But when his parents arrive from Asia they expect a real ceremony, and so the farce—and the drama woven into it—escalates. Though not among Mr. Lee's very best films, it's impressive for how it wrings something genuine out of what might, in other hands, have felt like little more than a sitcom.
If 'The Wedding Banquet' has now not fallen into those hands, exactly, it has nonetheless suffered a degeneration, courtesy of director Andrew Ahn's present-day remake of the same name. While it arrives at a time when retreads and resurrections are all the rage, reviving this particular plot doesn't seem like the worst idea—see how another story of love and deception, the Miklós László play 'Parfumerie,' became Ernst Lubitsch's classic 'The Shop Around the Corner,' then the jewel of a musical 'She Loves Me,' and finally Nora Ephron's AOL-era rom-com 'You've Got Mail.' Yet 'The Wedding Banquet' has been awkwardly contorted to fit the world of today, with flat direction and a cast that largely flounders in a muddled middle ground between antic comedy and sentimental drama.