'The Wedding Banquet' Is the Glorious Gay Feast Right Now's Been Begging For

Andrew Ahn is a real one. The talented writer-director behind Spa Night, Driveways (my personal fave), and 2022’s bawdy Austen-reimagining Fire Island, has now pulled off a four-for-four tour-de-force with this weekend’s The Wedding Banquet, an exquisite laugh-through-tears and cry-through-laughs update of Ang Lee’s queer classic from 1993. Casting across these filthy hetero-stink days like a ray of much-needed rainbow, Ahn’s script (which he wrote alongside the original film’s author James Schamus) lightly lifts the sweet farce of Lee’s film on yonder to this trashcan year of 2025, gifting us with a portrait of modern queer family that would’ve seemed like science-fiction to the characters in that earlier film.

And yet, our comedies and our tragedies both keep kicking—compounding, even. It’s wild to see through this fresh refraction how much we’ve changed as still we while away at many of the same problems, self-inflicted or elsewise. Or to quote the wise poetess Jerri Blank, “Though the faces may have changed, the hassles are still the same.” Point being yes we can all be our worst enemies, but (as with everything) gay people just do it the best.

Honestly, it’s wild that it took this long for somebody to reimagine the original? But then that’s also not a thing I would’ve thought before watching Ahn and his cast make it look so effortless here. When I first heard the news of this remake, I was mildly bewildered. The original, although slightly forgotten to its time, is pretty much perfect. Well bewilderment, begone. That’s how you know you’re in capable hands—the previously unthinkable rendered thought-of and divine.

This Wedding Banquet stars Lily Gladstone and Kelly Marie-Tran as Lee and Angela, a couple who own a great big gorgeous inherited house in Seattle that they share with their best friends Chris and Min, who are also a couple and are played by Bowen Yang and Han Gi-Chan. On the surface this foursome seem happy and good and bright enough, but issues be a’bubbling just beneath—for one Lee and Angela have been trying to conceive through IVF but it hasn’t been going well. And Angela seems kinda skittish about the prospect of being a mother altogether. (Which makes a lot of sense once you get a look at her PFLAG-waving one-woman pride-parade of a mom, played by a wickedly hilarious Joan Chen.)

Meanwhile, Chris and Min seem to be stuck in a holding pattern. Chris is awash in millennial ennui, a part-time birder who’s unable to finish grad school (“Queer Theory takes the fun out of being gay!” is his not-wrong excuse) or to cement his relationship status with Min five years into the thing. For his own part Min’s on the emotional lam from his extremely rich family, who live in Korea and know nothing of his gayness—raised by homophobic grandparents, Min butches it up in a suit and tie for their monthly video conferences where he gets his financial stipend (which allows him to keep on being an artist in another country), but that seems to be the extent of their relationship.

Like spinning plates, all of these issues depend on a pact of centrifugal avoidance—just keep spinning spinning spinning lest everything wobble and tumble. Enter plot, stage left. Min’s grandmother Ja-Young (played by Minari Oscar winner Youn Yuh-jung) decides it’s time for Min to come home and join the family business, just as money issues start mucking about with Lee and Angela’s baby-making plans. And so one drunken night the couples realize their problems might have a ridiculous solution, the sort that cinematic farces have been thriving on for a century—if Min gets married to Angela he’ll pay for their IVF and get his grandmother off his back in one fell swoop; wham bam everybody wins!

Would that it were so simple. Ja-Young smells a rat and hops the next plane to Seattle demanding answers, and from there the twists get so knotty it’d be a cruelty to untangle them for you when the movie’s having such a good time playing cat’s cradle with this batch of stunted lovesick fools. Save the characters the film’s been heading toward the same plot shenanigans as the original up to this point—just know Ahn & Schamus found convincing ways to update things to now without having to make anybody seem like a moron. Farces have been known to lean on the plot-mechanics of idiocy if they’re not keenly directed, but you can tell that the filmmakers love these characters (fucked up though they might be) far too intricately to not show us exactly what’s driving them to all of this outlandish nonsense.

And oh, what love this movie thrums with. Utterly, deep and profound wellsprings of love for everybody, foibles and all. From Ahn’s direction down through the script to each and every one of these performances, The Wedding Banquet is so warm it will make your heart glow like E.T.’s and grow like the Grinch’s. There is a scene late in the film after complications have gotten out of hand where Gladstone and Marie-Tran have an entire conversation without speaking a word, and if they don’t have you in buckets of tears by its end you must be chronically dehydrated. An early contender for scene of the year, I’d wager.

As good as our main foursome all are, though it’s actually Youn who ends up walking away with the film in my estimation. Showing up at the end of the first act and immediately upending the plot in ways you might think you will but definitely will not see coming, Youn casts a spell of wonder and humor and sadness over her every second of screentime; her character of Ja-Young is nobody’s fool, and her individual interactions with every single other character yields one astonishing scene after another. I truly can’t see this not proving to be one of the great performances of the year right here—she levels every moment up, and had me an utter and devoted mess by film’s end.

It’s hardly revolutionary for a film about a gay friend group to have “it’s the families we make along the way” end up being the beating heart of its tale. But as with everything Ahn’s made to date it’s the writer-director’s generosity, his empathy and compassion, and his fascination with stillness—the small human moments in between the outsized ones—that ends up making The Wedding Banquet such a joy and a revelation to experience. This film just feels like such a gift landing here in 2025 with its empathetic message of community; of a place where we can just look at one another and speak volumes, radiate warmth, loved one to loved one, filmmaker to audience.