The Wedding Banquet (2025)

Sometimes marriage calls for more than love. It also takes guts.

The Wedding Banquet (2025)

In theaters

This is a gay movie, but much more than sexuality drives it. There’s literally one sex scene, and it’s performed totally for laughs, not for any erotic charge. The characters are trying to find their footing in the world, and who they go to bed with doesn’t even begin to define them or sum up their predicaments.

Who and how deeply they love is what gets them into trouble. Welcome to 21^st-century sexual liberation – decent people negotiating knotty secrets, shaky trust and fragile hopes.

In Seattle a lesbian couple, Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) and Lee (Lily Gladstone, Killers of the Flower Moon), are settled homeowners yearning to start a family. Living in their backyard in a refurbished garage/coach house are a gay couple, Chris (SNL’s Bowen Yang) and Min (Han Gi-chan).

Chris, temporarily stymied in completing his doctoral dissertation, is in a holding pattern working for an outfit that coordinates bird-watching groups.

Min is a talented artist and designer, but since he’s the heir to an international corporation, his Korea-based family wants him to return home and join the business. Min is ready to marry Chris, who balks because his career hasn’t taken shape yet.

The four friends enjoy a tight bond of mutual support. Lee is past 35 and has undergone two IVF treatments that didn’t work out.

She’s not sure she’s emotionally up for a third try. Angela is younger but doesn’t want to take on that physical challenge of IVF, which strains the relationship. Also, another IVF regimen will be costly, and they’re heavily mortgaged.

This is a remake of the 1993 movie of the same name directed by Ang Lee, and it plays out on a changed cultural landscape. James Schamus co-wrote the original screenplay and co-wrote this new version with the director, Andrew Ahn.

They’ve made comforting updates. There was no lesbian couple in the original movie, but, more important, the two relationships here unfold in a much freer social environment. None of these four people lives or moves within any sort of LGBTQ+ enclave, because their openness is a given.

They’re part of Seattle’s gay community, and there are no social strictures on them. They can be as gay as they like, all over town. So, the fluid performances have a bounce and cheekiness that flow from the characters’ personalities, not from any rancorous struggle with their social “situation”.

But being open isn’t the same as being carefree. Decision time arrives for both couples. Min, a Korean immigrant, has to marry an American or he’ll lose his green card. But Chris won’t be rushed.

Min (Han Gi-chan) and Chris (Bowen Yang) poised on the brink of commitment

Another hitch: Min’s parents are deceased, and his grandparents, based in Korea, don’t know he’s gay. His deeply homophobic grandfather would be aghast.

On Zoom, his formidable grandmother Ja-Young (Youn Yuh-jung, an Oscar winner for Minari) issues an ultimatum. If Min marries and gets his green card, he can stay in America. Otherwise, he’ll have to return to Korea and join the family business.

Panicked, Min devises a quick fix. He’ll marry Angela, in a traditional Korean ceremony in Seattle. To thank Angela and Lee, Min will pay for their next IVF regimen.

When Min gleefully informs Ja-Young of his impending marriage to a woman, she announces she’ll be coming to Seattle to size up her grandson’s newly disclosed marital partner.

Before her arrival Angela and Lee have to “de-gay” their house, hiding the artwork, books and DVDs that only two lesbians would own. Hilarity ensues.

Angela’s mother May (Joan Chen) is thrilled to join in on the ruse. When Angela came out years before, May took the news badly. In the years since, she’s done a total 180 and become a vociferously public lesbian mom. She even wins awards for her support of the LGBTQ+ community.

Joan Chen as May, the ideal lesbian support mom, giddily strutting her stuff in public

May seems to be the model mom of a courageous daughter, always showing off at parental support group events, dressed to the nines for the cameras. But there’s more going on below the surface.

Mother and daughter rarely share intimate concerns, and it seems that Angela has become a symbol to her mother, a social badge of honor rather than a struggling adult who deserves respect.

To the movie’s enormous credit, it keeps going there, to where people hurt and no longer want to pretend. Angela’s sham marriage is too close for comfort to Lee, who for the first time wonders out loud why she, the older woman, is the prospective child-bearer.

Chris is deeply uncomfortable, too. Sure, Angela and Min will only pretend to be actually married for a few weeks until Ja-Young boards a plane back to Korea. But why can’t he take his future in his hands and in real life marry Min, a man who loves him unreservedly?

Finally, of course, it’s not marriage that’s at issue for these four sincere but wary people. It’s the courage they need to summon. Do that, the script suggests, and life finds ways forward that we might never have foreseen.

The insightfully chosen cast hits all the right notes, and each performance is nuanced.

The biggest surprise may be Yang as Chris. The comedian is well known for his scathing comic timing on sketch television, but here he has to flesh out a character who doesn’t have sharp comebacks, who wants to move his life forward but isn’t sure he has the strength.

To play tentativeness for a whole movie is a stiff challenge. Yang makes Chris feel steadily more earnest, and it’s satisfying to watch his determination grow.

Han Gi-chan in his acting debut as Min makes a perfect foil. This man with the soul of an artist can go all in emotionally. He just needs to take a firmer grip of Chris’ hand to ready them both for the leap into full commitment.

It’s lovely to see Lily Gladstone get to play a woman who longs to bear a child but who’s otherwise untroubled, walking on relatively calm waters throughout. Her character is tough but sure enough of herself to help Angela come into her own.

Angela’s wit and feistiness in playing a fake wife deepens her tenderness toward Lee. Tran’s performance puts two facets of Angela in harmony, (1) the daughter who can confront and accept her mother and (2) the lover who deep down knows her heart lies with Lee — where donning a Korean wedding gown is no more than a comic caper.

Joan Chen is funny, warm and foxily bold as May, the mother who can put on a glamorous show for the public but must learn to form an honest bond with an adult daughter who still needs a parent’s support.

Min, Ja-Young and Angela in the wedding ceremony that isn’t exactly what it seems

Overseeing the moral twists and turns is Ja-Young, the grandmother who right from the start sees more than she tells. Youn Yuh-jung in the role gives the movie’s most calmly meditative performance.

Through the shenanigans designed to conceal a bound-to-be-discovered ruse, this astonishing veteran performer doesn’t just act, she holds court, bringing all the other actors into her realm.

To enact the wise center of a roiling story is one thing. To be the visual focus for all the turmoil means the actress goes above and beyond the demands of the script. One sign of a great actress is how her stillness on camera draws an audience closer. Watch Lillian Gish in anything and you’ll see what I mean.

Youn Yuh-jung has a presence that feels profoundly Eastern, conjured from a spiritual realm that stills troubled waters and casts welcome, healing light. This gentle rom com with a quite silly premise left me feeling awakened, even renewed. The marriage of true minds seems to happen on screen. And I always shed a tear at weddings.