How Ang Lee’s ‘The Wedding Banquet’ changed my life in high school

I’m not sure how I would react in a crowded theater to what Ahn did with this material. I may have leaned into one extreme (“I love it!”) or another (“Andrew Ahn just massacred my teenhood!”); I may have come to the same conclusion as I did watching the movie by myself, namely that it isn’t the same narrative. That’s not a bad thing. If all Ahn cared about was maintaining fidelity to Lee’s masterpiece, we’d have little reason to watch it.

But The Wedding Banquet (2025) stands firmly on its own from The Wedding Banquet (1993): It’s often breathtakingly hilarious, a comedy of errors and fish-out-of-water culture clash between American and Asian, straight and gay, young and old. It is tenderhearted, sweet without the treacle, and sharp-edged enough that its bitterest interpersonal conflicts cut deep enough to cause alarm. Yang’s performance further signals his growth as a shrewd seriocomic actor, a flag he raised as co-lead in the 2022 queer rom-com Fire Island, which Ahn also directed; Tran is one of our great screen criers; Gladstone nails “graceful but visibly suppressing dissatisfaction” in a single expression; and Han steals whole scenes with exasperated one-liners. There’s no true discovery in these details, though, which is key to my appreciation of Lee’s film, and therefore, for me, the film itself.

I’m not being fair toward Ahn’s remake, but how could I? (Let me take a beat to be fair: you should go see Ahn’s movie. It is very, very good, and if you don’t see it, we won’t get more movies like it.) The Wedding Banquet (1993) showed me new identities of Asian cinema, far away from jidaigeki and chanbara films, and kung-fu flicks. In my day, a white boy’s typical first exposure to Asian movies fell in the ballpark of Kurosawa, with Rashomon and Seven Samurai as creaking gateways toward yet more of the filmmaker’s work, and Jackie Chan, whose Rumble in the Bronx sparked my lifelong love for meticulously choreographed scenes of mobs of anonymous bad guys getting their butts kicked by lone men in tank tops. (Depending on the house you grew up in, you could swap Chan for Bruce Lee.) The idea that Asian films existed outside of that box was unheard of. (Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon peers over the box’s folds, but doesn’t leave it, either.)

The Wedding Banquet splintered those preconceptions for me. That fits, being as the film is also about dismantling preconceptions, and the extreme cousin of preconception, prejudice. Wai-Tung isn’t out to his family, like Min in Ahn’s remake. Unlike Min, Wai-Tung’s relationship with Simon is solid—Chris struggles with commitment, Ahn’s way of differentiating his story from Lee’s, while expanding it—and so his greatest concern is deflecting his parents’ nudges about marrying a woman and having kids. They, of course, have no idea Simon exists. When Wai-Tung announces that he’s getting hitched to Wei-Wei, they believe their dream for their son—and let’s face it, for themselves as they’re eager for grandchildren—will come to pass. The trick is, they’re right, but with some tweaks.

That’s just the traced outline of The Wedding Banquet’s arc. The full picture captures life-or-death drama. Mrs. Gao (Gua Ah-leh), Wai-Tung’s mother, is shocked when he reveals the ruse in a moment of broken anger. She demands he keep the secret from his father, Mr. Gao (Lung Sihung), worried for his health as he contemporaneously recovers from a stroke. Ahn waters down this element in his film. He doesn’t introduce us to Min’s virulently homophobic grandfather, the replacement character for Mr. Gao. Instead, we meet his grandmother, Ja-Young (Youn Yuh-jung), who, like the Gaos with Wai-Tung, doesn’t know Min is gay. It’s a revision of necessity, since Ahn’s The Wedding Banquet is oriented on the interpersonal problems between its lead quartet, but it ultimately deprives the story of its greatest beat.

Simon is a catch. Despite having to hide his relationship to Wai-Tung from his would-be parents-in-law, he takes routine strolls with Mr. Gao as part of his aftercare. On one such walk, as the pair rest by the waterfront, Mr. Gao produces a red envelope from his pocket. “Happy birthday, Simon,” he says. Simon smiles once the shock wears off from learning Mr. Gao speaks English. “Even I forgot,” the  latter replies. Then, the second wave of shock hits. It isn’t a birthday gift—it’s a hongbao. Panic flashes across Simon’s face. If Mr. Gao knows, what does that mean for the wedding, the marriage, and the baby in Wei-Wei’s belly, the product of the bedding ceremony foisted on her and Wai-Tung after their nuptials?

In real life, this would be the moment when things fall apart. In The Wedding Banquet, it’s when they come together. “Wai-Tung is my son. So you are my son also,” Mr. Gao says. He asks Simon to keep his secret, to tell nobody he knows the truth, and then, switching to Mandarin, explains that if not for the sham marriage, he wouldn’t have a grandchild on the way. “I don’t understand,” Simon says, speaking literally. “I don’t understand,” Mr. Gao responds, speaking figuratively. It’s a rare moment in movies in which characters acknowledge their mutual miscomprehension, and find harmony together in that space. The particulars that Mr. Gao doesn’t understand are trivial compared to what he does: that Simon loves his son and makes him happy, and that the charade will bring a child into the world. That’s more than enough.

So while The Wedding Banquet didn’t awaken anything in me, so to speak, the film did galvanize a love and respect for Asian cinema, and culture—which I was previously ignorant of, even though I was fortunate enough to have international classmates from countries like Taiwan, China, Japan, and South Korea. I needed the hongbao sequence explained to me, for instance, for its significance to set in. Today, it’s my go-to answer whenever a prompt crosses my desk where the scene might apply: Biggest twist, biggest tearjerker, kindest elderly character, best movie scene involving an envelope. Likewise, The Wedding Banquet is, in 2025, my favorite Lee film, instrumental in my education as a budding cineaste and future critic. I don’t know if I’d be the same Andy Crump without it. I just know which Andy Crump I am because of it.