There is no one-size-fits-all formula for successfully remaking a beloved classic. Do you just maintain the broad brushstrokes and fill in the gaps with all new colors? Do you (as it was strangely popular a few short years ago) gender-swap characters to make a half-baked point? Do you just not do it at all? While the film industry hasn’t found a perfect fool-proof recipe yet, anyone who’s still searching for it should keep a close eye on Andrew Ahn’s spirited “The Wedding Banquet” reimagining—a modern-day tale with an old-fashioned spirit, a joyous crowd-pleaser with the most romantic of hearts.
More than three decades ago, Ang Lee’s ahead-of-its-time classic “The Wedding Banquet” was marked by the same qualities too, in navigating the tale of a queer couple and one of the life partners’ arranged marriage to their female tenant to both trick his conservative parents and help the bride with her green card. Co-written by Ahn (“Fire Island”) and multi-hyphenate industry legend James Schamus (who also co-wrote Lee’s original), the 2025 iteration first and foremost recognizes that a lot has advanced in America when it comes to the LGBTQ+ community, cultural representation, and the country’s multi-racial construct (even though today’s conservative government is a threat to many hard-earned rights and freedoms). But it also understands that the core of everyone’s shared humanity hasn’t changed: love still conquers all, families (especially chosen families) are worth fighting for, and generational relationships are complicated as ever.
Key to this adaptation’s formula is its honesty in bringing the source’s characters to this side of the 21st century: towards how things have thankfully changed, and what has stayed the same. The story is roughly as you’ll remember, but about two couples instead of one. On one side are the lovable rich kid Min (Han Gi-Chan) and his boyfriend Chris (Bowen Yang), who has commitment issues. They are housemates with (and tenants of) Lily Gladstone’s Lee and Kelly Marie Tran’s Angela—a couple crazy about each other, desperately trying for a baby through IVF treatments. Before anything advances in the story, Ahn and Schamus generously allow the audience to seize the rhythms of this unique quartet’s Seattle-based life (Vancouver stands in for the city) and fully grasp their closeness. Meanwhile, we also meet Angela’s mother, May (Joan Chen), an image-focused yet supportive parent overcompensating for the times she wasn’t there for Angela. (Rightfully, Angela hasn’t moved on from those painful years yet.)
The story clicks into place once Min, an heir to his Korean family’s fortune and business, pops the question to Chris, only to be turned down. Elsewhere, he finds himself threatened by an expiring visa. So what if he married his friend Angela, got his Green Card, and funded Angela and Lee’s IVF treatments as a way to say thanks? It’s a proposal that makes some sense on paper. But once Min’s grandmother, Ja-Young (the great Youn Yuh-jung, Oscar-winner for “Minari”) decides to travel to the US unannounced and meet the bride-to-be, things get a little out of hand.
It wouldn’t be fun to reveal every beat, but to say that Ja-Young quietly understands more than Min gives her credit for wouldn’t quite be a spoiler. With their cover blown and a powerful family member on their side, the wedding still moves forward, and an unexpected baby comes into the picture to make things even more complicated. There are several laughs along the way, though sometimes, you feel like there should be more of them for a “Birdcage”-type comedy of errors of this sort. But whatever “The Wedding Banquet” falls slightly short of in the jokes department, it more than makes up for with its loving attention to detail about each character, giving them all their individual arcs and moments to shine. Equally beautiful is Ahn’s uncompromising sense of place and representation of an intersection of cultures with adoring specifics. In that, the Seattle house the quartet occupies shines with countless invitingly cozy and lived-in touches. And Min and Angela’s sham marriage honors Korean traditions beautifully without taking any shortcuts.
But “The Wedding Banquet” serves its richest dish through the shared love amongst its characters, even inspiring a few organically shed tears during compassionate, wisely written moments between Chris and Ja-Young, especially Angela and May. Chosen families give us strength, a sense of purpose, and community. And what a wonderful (sometimes in real life, utopic) bonus it is when those we’re born into also opt in to join our exclusive circle of chosen ones, however belatedly? It’s no coincidence that you leave “The Wedding Banquet” with a sense of comfortable fullness, with a sweet feeling of completion, sensing that Lee, Angela, Chris, and Min, along with their elders, feel it in their bones, too.
