Many remakes are utterly pointless, whether they’re disregarding what made a movie good or interesting in the first place, or paying such slavish homage that a second version becomes redundant, rather than a worthy variation. If nothing else, the contemporary reconfiguration of The Wedding Banquet passes the remake test handily. Ang Lee’s original 1993 film is about a bisexual Taiwanese immigrant, living happily with his male partner, who hastily arranges a lavish (and, emotionally speaking, fake) wedding to a woman to please his visiting parents; the director/co-writer Andrew Ahn, who shares screenplay credit with the original co-writer James Schamus, relocates the story from 1993 Manhattan to 2025 Seattle, and contends with a whole different set of social rules and actual laws in the process.
Ahn is so acutely aware of how times have changed, in fact, that he seems reluctant to mine the new situation for comedy. Lee (Lily Gladstone) and Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) are unmarried but committed lesbians about to go through their second expensive round of IVF. They can afford to live in the Seattle area largely because Lee has inherited her family home, where she yearns to start a family of her own; the couple also rents out a converted garage to Angela’s longtime bestie Chris (Bowen Yang) and his boyfriend, Min (Han Gi-chan). Min, who comes from money, has been in the US on a student visa that’s about to expire, and his grandparents want him to return to Korea and help run the family business. A green card is just a marriage proposal away, but commitment-resistant Chris is hesitant to marry, especially for convenience. So Min makes a counter-proposal: he’ll secure some of his family money to pay for Lee and Angela’s IVF, and in exchange, Min will marry Angela, for a green card and for familial show.
