There couldn’t be a better time for Andrew Ahn’s remake of The Wedding Banquet to arrive. When the rights of the LGBTQ+ community are under greater assault than ever, an updated take on Ang Lee’s 1993 film, itself vital for its depiction of gays on the big screen, could have a tremendous impact. Today Bleecker Street has dropped a new trailer for the comedy starring SNL‘s Bowen Yang and Oscar nominee Lily Gladstone.
Directed by Andrew Ahn (Driveways, Fire Island) and co-written by Ahn and James Schamus, The Wedding Banquet‘s plot is mostly the same although some of the characters have been tweaked. Yang plays a gay man in need of a green card, with Gladstone as the lesbian woman who marries him for the financial support. When his grandmother shows up and disrupts their plan for a secret wedding, all hilarity ensues.
Also in The Wedding Banquet cast are Kelly Marie Tran, Han Gi-Chan, Joan Chen, and Youn Yuh-Jung. Ahn and Yang worked together previously on Fire Island. This is a chance to see Yang in a more dramatic role than we’ve seen before. Gladstone, best known for her Oscar-nominated performance in Killers of the Flower Moon, is also taking on a role that’s different from what we’ve seen from her thus far.
SYNOPSIS: A chosen family of four friends each struggling to navigate their adulthood responsibilities and relationships. Angela (Tran) and her partner Lee (Gladstone) have had repeated unsuccessful IVF treatments, and the financial strain is worsening. Min (Han) and his commitment-phobic boyfriend Chris (Yang) can’t agree on taking their relationship to the next level, but Min’s student visa is running out. In an attempt to solve the friend group’s ever-growing problems, Min proposes marriage to Angela to secure his green card in exchange for funding Lee’s IVF treatment. When Min’s skeptical grandmother makes a surprise visit and insists on an extravagant wedding, the friends’ commitment to their scheme – and to one another – begins to waiver.
The Wedding Banquet opens in theaters on April 18th and you can check out Cortland’s early review here.
