The Wedding Banquet is a gentle ode to found family

Andrew Ahn’s The Wedding Banquet is about two gay couples (one pair female, the other male) who enter into a messy straight-presenting marriage arrangement to please the strict, traditional grandparents of one of their group. In most versions of this story — and indeed the 1993 Ang Lee movie of the same name on which Ahn’s film is based — keeping the charade going would make up most of the movie, with everything falling apart at the end of the second act, followed by hard-won reconciliation.

These things do happen in Ahn’s movie, but what’s pleasantly surprising is the way in which they happen. Ahn deepens and complicates the dynamics of his central quad of queer found family, and their relationships with their biological family, making his The Wedding Banquet a movie about many kinds of relationship — communal, parental, romantic and more.

Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) and Lee (Lily Gladstone) are long-time partners trying for a baby. They share Lee’s house with Angela’s college friend Chris (Bowen Yang) and his partner Min (Han Gi-Chan). Min’s rich grandmother Ja-Young (Youn Yuh-jung) informs Min that he needs to come home to run the family business or else be cut off. Min attempts to hold her off by getting Angela to agree to a green card marriage in exchange for Min paying for Lee’s IVF treatment. When Ja-Young makes an unexpected visit to the gang’s home in Seattle, insisting on a traditional wedding ceremony, things get even messier.

Ahn (Driveways, Fire Island) specializes in empathetic, character-driven storytelling, so it’s not that surprising that the whole marriage act gets dropped pretty quickly to focus on the people at the story’s heart. Ja-Young knows what’s going on, but loves her grandson enough to help him make something work. Angela’s mom May (Joan Chen), an outspoken LGBTQ ally, worries how her daughter’s sham nuptials will make her look at PFLAG meetings. All of the stress, plus Angela and Chris’ underlying reluctance to take the necessary next steps with Lee and Min, starts damaging the characters’ actual romantic partnerships.

Ahn is less interested in plot-driven antics and more in slowing down and exploring how all of these wild developments make the people involved in them feel. Sometimes this means The Wedding Banquet can feel a little ambling and unfocused. However, patient viewers will be rewarded with a lovely final act, as those relationship dynamics start to pay off in a series of increasingly heartwarming moments.

That journey is buoyed along by a lovely quartet of performances from Tran, Gladstone, Yang and Han. Gladstone and Yang, in particular, really shine. Gladstone’s grounded sweetness makes Lee easy to love, and her gradually growing uncertainty and hurt are genuinely heartbreaking to watch. Yang’s gift for deadpan delivery particularly elevates the movie’s climax, where Chris makes a grand gesture, but clearly feels kind of embarrassed about it. Bobo Le, as Chris’ cousin Kendall, rounds out the cast nicely, providing several of the film’s best jokes.

Ahn’s The Wedding Banquet is an open-hearted, well-observed look at expectations, the anxieties of life in your 30s and — most importantly — the beauty of unconventional found families. Ahn gives us characters whose flaws are opportunities for growth, not criticism, who try to do the right thing, screw up, and seek reconciliation that they earn honestly, not because the script dictates that it’s the right time. While that results in a film that moves a little more slowly than a conventional studio rom-com, it’s such a rewarding journey that you may find yourself a little teary-eyed by the time the credits roll.