The Wedding Banquet (2025)
First screened in May 2025 / Most recently screened in June 2025
Director: Andrew Ahn. Cast: Kelly Marie Tran, Han Gi-chan, Bowen Yang, Lily Gladstone, Joan Chen, Youn Yuh-jung, Bobo Le, Emma Li, Jeffrey Liang. Screenplay: Andrew Ahn and James Schamus (based on the 1993 film directed by Ang Lee and written by Ang Lee, Neil Peng, and James Schamus). In Brief:
Admirably sidesteps the path of simple duplication, but the vision doesn't feel unified. Feels rushed, frugal.
VOR:②
Something to be said for the contemporary, multiracial U.S. milieu and the udpate on queer life. But stakes feel low and the shape too loose.
I will forever adore Spa Night, I hate that Driveways got shafted by COVID release chaos, I liked This Close quite a bit on TV, and I stay rooting for writer-director Andrew Ahn. But after the very different Fire Island, this is two projects in a row that feel imperfectly matched to his gifts (even though I get his attraction to each) and that, for me, fall well short of their potential. Ang Lee's Wedding Banquet is only a little less of an albatross on Ahn's than Pride and Prejudice was on the neck of Fire Island. They're both chock-full of cluh-clunky plotting and forced character journeys, wearing their original texts like ill-fitting garments into which they've been crammed; then again, when they sporadically doff those outfits entirely, they look rail-thin and awfully exposed.
Tran and Han fare best among The Wedding Banquet's main cast, and for different reasons I love that Ahn chose them. Yang, by contrast, looks increasingly unready for the big screen, barely attempting to fill in a character between or behind his lines and overexpectant of audience compassion for his slightly sour neediness and vague self-flagellation. Youn and Chen are total pros, but the arcs assigned to them feel inorganic to the women they've located inside this ill-defined and oddly constructed script, co-authored by James Schamus, who also contributed to the first Wedding Banquet script. At least what doesn't work in the new one results from miscalculations by an unprotective author and an adoring fan eager to take new, era-specific risks with a property that's meaningful to them. Nobody needs another duplication. I just wish there were more that did unambiguously click this time around.
Cinematographer Ki Jin Kim brings some of the damp, atmospheric texture to the images that better served Spa Night and Driveways, where his melancholic forte made more sense. There were moments I was intrigued by this Wedding Banquet's ambitious desire to be farcical and mournful all at the same time, or in recurrent alternations. Most of the time, though, that combination just felt out of step with a screenplay whose best bet would have been full-speed-ahead character comedy. There are fun traces of that movie that mostly didn't get made: the shamelessly Orientalist drag queen with two cross-town bookings on the same night, a throwaway jab at a cultural obsession with feeling "seen," etc. But I'm just not sure that screwball merriment is Ahn's métier (much as I genuinely admire him for flexing), or that what we get instead is what anyone was looking for from this unsteady reinvention of a fondly recalled mini-classic. Grade:C+
