It takes some time for “The Marriage ceremony Banquet,” Ang Lee’s 1993 hit romantic comedy, to get to the large occasion of the title, but it surely’s well worth the wait. The bride, Wei-Wei (Might Chin), and the groom, Wai-Tung (Winston Chao), look suitably gorgeous. The venue is a gigantic Chinese language restaurant in New York Metropolis, the place platters of lobster gleam so sumptuously they could possibly be anticipating the lavish feasts to return in Lee’s 1994 food-porn extravaganza, “Eat Drink Man Lady.” Lee movies the marriage reception and its rituals with an nearly anthropological curiosity, and the composure of his digital camera solely heightens the brash, bacchanalian comedy of the proceedings. There are bizarre, humiliating video games, bawdy speeches, bursts of boozy laughter, and a punitive spirit of newlywed hazing. The liquor flows so freely that the remainder room almost turns into a vomitorium. One of many few white company murmurs, “God, and I believed the Chinese language had been meek, quiet math whizzes.” One other attendee wryly replies, “You’re witnessing the outcomes of 5 thousand years of sexual repression.”
The actor who delivers that final line is Lee himself, making an uncredited cameo in one in every of his early breakthrough movies. He may need been foreshadowing the remainder of his profession, as repression has proved to be his most sturdy and resonant topic. Lee has drifted freely between continents and eras, with outcomes as completely different—and very good—as “The Ice Storm” (1997), “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” (2000), “Brokeback Mountain” (2005), and “Lust, Warning” (2007). However, repeatedly, no matter time or place, he has rediscovered the identical thread: the imposition of inflexible social constraints upon uncontrollable wishes.
In “The Marriage ceremony Banquet,” Lee shrewdly pitched the drama between two distinct however overlapping spheres of repression; he lovingly skewered the tensions and obligations on the coronary heart of so many Asian parent-child relationships and merged them, nearly seamlessly, with the agonies and anxieties of closeted homosexual life. The marriage began as an elaborate three-way ruse concocted by Wai-Tung, a homosexual Taiwanese American man; his white boyfriend, Simon (Mitchell Lichtenstein); and Wei-Wei, an undocumented Chinese language immigrant. This marriage of comfort, it’s believed, will provide Wei-Wei with a inexperienced card and fulfill Wai-Tung’s Taiwan-based dad and mom, Mr. Gao (Lung Sihung) and Mrs. Gao (Gua Ah-leh), who don’t know that their son is homosexual and have been pressuring him to discover a spouse and begin a household.
However issues go awry when the Gaos unexpectedly fly out to New York for his or her son’s nuptials, kicking the scheme into overdrive and setting the grand marriage ceremony feast in movement. The genius of the banquet sequence is that, even when the festivities do mark a collective launch of rigidity, as Lee the bit participant notes, Lee the director insures that the stress by no means stops constructing. We see the discomfort in Wai-Tung’s and Wei-Wei’s faces as they’re marched by way of a gauntlet of pressured cheer and made to down drink after drink. Everybody thinks they’re celebrating; they’re actually drowning sorrows that they don’t have the liberty to specific.
Might Chin, Winston Chao, and Mitchell Lichtenstein in 1993’s “The Marriage ceremony Banquet.”{Photograph} from Samuel Goldwyn Movies / Everett Assortment
Now, greater than three a long time later, we’ve got a brand new model of “The Marriage ceremony Banquet” earlier than us. This one, set in present-day Seattle, was directed and co-written by the Korean American filmmaker Andrew Ahn; in a poignant contact, he co-wrote the script with James Schamus, Lee’s longtime collaborator and a co-writer on the 1993 movie. The trickiness of the duty earlier than them is obvious on the outset. In an period of widespread L.G.B.T.Q.+ acceptance, how do you style a breezy but serious-minded romantic comedy predicated on the deceptions of the closet? When marriage equality is the regulation of the land—even when the present political order dispiritingly reveals that every one progress is provisional—what function does a brand new “Marriage ceremony Banquet” serve?
Ahn and Schamus search to reply that query with the information that acceptance brings pointed problems of its personal. Angela (Kelly Marie Tran), an introverted analysis scientist in her thirties, might have come out as a lesbian years in the past to her mother, Might (Joan Chen), however that has hardly purged their relationship of unstated resentments; it doesn’t assist that Might, gregarious and self-aggrandizing by nature, has turn into a social butterfly of the native L.G.B.T.Q.+ scene, successful awards for queer allyship as Angela stews quietly on the sidelines. Angela a minimum of has a loving relationship together with her nurturing, openhearted companion, Lee (Lily Gladstone), a neighborhood organizer of Duwamish descent who is raring for them to begin a household. Angela and Lee are shut buddies with their tenants—Chris (Bowen Yang) and his boyfriend of 5 years, Min (Han Gi-chan)—who dwell in Lee’s storage. Chris, sardonic and jaded, is a queer-studies grad pupil on hiatus; Min, earnest and romantic, is a textile artist, in addition to the inheritor to a Korean company dynasty.
It’s Min’s abroad household that units the story in movement. He’s within the U.S. on a soon-to-expire pupil visa, and his formidable grandmother, Ja-young (Youn Yuh-jung)—who doesn’t know that Min is homosexual, or that he has a gradual boyfriend—insists that he return to Korea and take his place within the household enterprise. A simple repair can be for Min to marry Chris, however Ahn’s “Marriage ceremony Banquet” isn’t all for ease. Because of a cluster of contrivances—Chris is a commitment-phobe, a trait effectively offered by Yang’s comedian petulance—Min finally ends up proposing a straight marriage to Angela. In the event that they wed, Min can keep within the U.S. and keep away from getting reduce off financially; in alternate, he’ll use his fortune to pay for a spherical of I.V.F. remedies for Lee, who has but to conceive after a number of makes an attempt.
It’s a whole lot of complication, however you go together with it, a minimum of initially, since you perceive on a sure degree what Ahn is doing: he’s framing this unruly quadrangle as a microcosm of kinds—a stand-in for a bigger, extra supportive queer neighborhood that exists now in ways in which it didn’t thirty years in the past. Even, or particularly, at its most desperately convoluted, the movie throws off a giddy sense of freedom, of the sheer vary of choices out there to Lee, Angela, Chris, and Min; their freedom to lie, in all method of artistic methods, far outstrips that of the sooner movie’s characters. There’s a contact of zany rise up, too, within the foursome’s go-for-broke scheme; beneficiaries of the hard-won proper to wed who they need and have kids if they need, they nonetheless deal with the establishments of marriage and parenthood with a sure cynicism—the irreverence of the as soon as disadvantaged.
For this viewer, the assorted narrative symmetries and substitutions couldn’t assist however amusingly call to mind the primary movie’s “meek, quiet math whizzes” line. Ahn will not be Chinese language (I’ll let others be the choose of meek and quiet), however he does know a factor or two concerning the elaborate character-based arithmetic that goes into structuring a recent farce. In juggling not one however two {couples}, he has augmented and rebalanced a tough comedian equation. There are different variables within the combine, too, most of them slyly repurposed from the unique materials. Lee’s craving for a kid serves as a callback to an unplanned-pregnancy subplot within the 1993 “Marriage ceremony Banquet.” Lee’s home, like Wai-Tung and Simon’s house, have to be totally and hilariously “de-queered” for the sake of appearances. (Among the many gadgets shunted to the storage: a Lilith Honest poster and a duplicate of the 2016 movie “Sure Ladies,” through which Lily Gladstone herself performed a younger lady crushing on Kristen Stewart.)
The script’s most attention-grabbing departure considerations the character of the matriarch Ja-young: upon listening to concerning the marriage ceremony, she jets to Seattle, spends barely 5 minutes watching Min and Angela play home, and immediately sees that one thing queer, in each sense, is afoot. You’ll be able to perceive why the script cuts to the fast; the laser-eyed Youn, who gained an Oscar for “Minari” (2020), is an actor of myriad talents, however taking part in the idiot isn’t one in every of them. Ja-young not solely realizes what’s happening however accepts her grandson’s choice, changing into a reluctant ally within the charade. However why, at that time, proceed with the charade in any respect? It’s a query the movie by no means satisfactorily solutions, and the marriage itself—a lavishly conventional Korean affair, with Min and Angela pressured into hanboks and trotted by way of one ceremonial ceremony after one other—feels nearly too perfunctory to advantage satisfaction of place within the title. The weak pretext is that the present should go on to allay the suspicions of Min’s conservative, conveniently offscreen grandfather. However the dramatic stakes are nonetheless undermined; it’s as if the plot, discovering too little resistance at residence, had no selection however to outsource its homophobia to Korea.
Ahn started his function profession with two exquisitely noticed impartial movies: “Spa Night time” (2016), a moody portrait of a younger man’s homosexual awakening, and “Driveways” (2019), a shifting story of an sudden cross-generational bond between neighbors. From there, Ahn made a leap towards the mainstream with “Fireplace Island” (2022), an exuberant homosexual riff on “Pleasure and Prejudice”; it was broad and ribald, with a naughtily Austentatious spirit that gained you over. You’ll be able to see why a reboot of “The Marriage ceremony Banquet,” which depends on emotional subtlety cohabiting with raucous hilarity, would have appeared a very good match for Ahn’s skills. Ang Lee pulled off that steadiness with supreme deftness in 1993; few particular person sequences might be pigeonholed as both purely comedic or purely dramatic.
Ahn’s adaptation, for all its up-to-the-minute relevance, isn’t almost as fluid, and it telegraphs its emotional intentions in scene after scene. Yang and Han, interesting actors and uninhibited comedians, have bother investing Chris and Min’s relationship with the emotional depth required to maintain the movie by way of some tortured third-act turns. Tran and Gladstone fare higher, even when they, too, usually are not all the time effectively served by the gear-grinding twists of the plot and a few on-the-nose arguments. Lee is frequently exasperated that Angela, each time confronted with something disagreeable, retreats into sullen silence—one thing of a culturally coded criticism, insofar as Asians and Asian Individuals are sometimes assumed to be expert nonverbal communicators, with a preternatural sensitivity to hidden cues and unstated tensions. Sarcastically, then, it’s Gladstone, essentially the most effortlessly expressive of the 4 leads, who radiates such feeling even when she’s not saying a phrase. On this primarily Asian enclave, the Native American character stands out as the designated cultural outsider, but it surely’s the heat of Gladstone’s presence that leaves an enduring impression and endows this remake—with all its reshufflings, impressed or strained—with a whisper of one thing authentically new. ♦