Ang Lee makes a funny, tender comedy from a marriage arranged to keep several people happy. The broader farce occasionally labours, but the cast give the family pressures a weight that the jokes cannot dismiss.
The Wedding Banquet is a warm, shrewd comedy about the trouble caused by trying to please your parents without telling them who you are. Ang Lee takes a gay Taiwanese real-estate agent in New York, gives him a marriage of convenience, and finds plenty to question in what looks like a workable solution. It is funny and affecting, though the broader passages sometimes keep a joke going after it has done its job. Lee understands how difficult it can be to disappoint people who love you.
The screenplay, by Lee, James Schamus and Neil Peng, gives the arrangement two practical purposes: satisfying the man’s parents and securing his tenant a green card. That makes the deception comprehensible before the comedy starts testing it. There is no need to turn the parents into monsters or the younger people into model citizens, and the writing largely resists both temptations. The jokes come from people trying to manage incompatible expectations while carrying on as if the business at hand were straightforward.
Winston Chao’s Gao Wai-Tung is an effective centre because his discomfort remains legible even when he is trying to pass it off. Gua Ah-leh and Lung Sihung, as Mrs. and Mr. Gao, give the parental expectations enough feeling that we understand why simply refusing them would be difficult. May Chin gives Gu Wei-Wei enough personality to keep her from becoming a practical solution to another character’s problem. The cast are particularly good at showing how much effort goes into appearing comfortable with this arrangement.
Mitchell Lichtenstein’s Simon is especially good in the smaller comedy, including the scene in which he teaches Wei-Wei to stir-fry. We found that little cooking lesson unexpectedly moving. The attention one person gives another is easy to recognise, even when everyone has reasons for not being entirely honest. The scene is small enough for Lichtenstein and Chin to play it without forcing the joke.
Jong Lin’s cinematography gives the telling glances their proper place, allowing the comedy to work through faces as well as conversation. Steve Rosenzweig’s production design is most effective in the opulence of the banquet, where a supposedly useful marriage has acquired a great deal of ceremony. Tim Squyres’s editing sustains the feast’s joke of a celebration that seems unwilling to end. Mader’s music handles the shifts between comedy and discomfort without much fuss, though it contributes less than the actors do.
The drawback is that Lee sometimes seems a little too pleased with the larger farce. Cultural misunderstanding provides reliable laughs, but it can make the characters more predictable than they are when exchanging those awkward looks. At 108 minutes, the film could spare some of the banquet’s repetition without losing the sense of a social event running beyond anyone’s control. The quieter comedy has already persuaded us to care, and the extra insistence does not help.
Family comedies can be quick to make the parents ridiculous, and Lee gives his older characters more consideration than that. Their expectations cause trouble because the younger people care about them, a difficulty this cast makes easy to understand. We recommend it, with fair warning that the wedding reception is rather pleased with its own stamina.
