Joan Chen Runs Away With The Wedding Banquet

Joan Chen is on a hot streak. The character actress is always good, sure, but these days, she’s better than good. She was the heart and soul of beloved crowd favorite Dìdi last summer, and now she’s back on the big screen with Andrew Ahn’s forthcoming The Wedding Banquet reimagining, which premiered at Sundance on January 27.

Based on the Ang Lee film of the same name, Ahn updated the film for a world in which being queer is not so much a sin as it is an obstacle to navigate. “Now that we can get married, do we even want to?” the director asked in his opening remarks. The Wedding Banquet tells the story of two couples: Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) and Lee (Lily Gladstone), and Chris (Bowen Yang) and Min (Han Gi-chan, in his first English-language role). Angela and Lee desperately want a baby, but their past two IVF rounds haven’t worked out, and they’re not sure they can afford another without taking out a second mortgage on their house. Min loves Chris and wants to be married, but Chris can’t decide if he wants to commit. If Min doesn’t get married soon, his family wants him to move back to Korea to take over the family corporation in lieu of the art practice he’s developed Stateside.

So the two couples hatch a plan as insane as it sounds: Min and Angela will get married so that Min can stay in the States while Chris makes up his mind, and in turn, Min will pay for another round of IVF for Lee. It ought to work, probably, definitely, so long as Min’s family — namely his scary grandmother (played by Minari Oscar winner Youn Yuh-jung) — doesn’t ask too many questions. For all that Min fears the judgment of his family, Angela, however, has the exact opposite problem. Her mother, Ja-Young Hyun (played by Chen), is almost annoyingly accepting of her sexuality, so much so that Angela getting fake straight-married is actually a way bigger problem for her mom than it is for her. Ja-Young, you see, is on the PFLAG board. She can’t have a heterosexual daughter.

As Ja-Young, Chen is cloying and enthusiastic and undeniably glamorous. She loves being an ally, especially one in the public eye. No one is more accepting than her, and Chen carries this sanctimoniousness with a loving wink. In fact, Chen was almost in Lee’s original film playing Tran’s character, but an issue of timing and budget led to her being recast. “This time, it’s great,” Chen said, before adding with a laugh, “I couldn’t play the girl, though.”

It ought to be any queer kid’s dream to have a parent so forthright and accepting — but that’s the rub with Angela’s mom. She didn’t always used to be this way, though she’d do anything to have the queer community think otherwise. It’s not so much that Angela remains self-conscious of her queerness so much as she’s insecure about everything, and Ja-Young’s aggressive acceptance only makes everything worse. Angela’s resentment bubbles and simmers: The more pissed off she gets, the more Chen really lays it on thick. Everything is about Ja-Young. Every cut to Tran’s furrowed brow after her mom does, well, anything got laughs out of the audience at the Eccles Theater.

Like any convoluted romantic comedy, The Wedding Banquet’s foursome’s big silly scheme doesn’t exactly go according to plan. Eventually, Angela’s resentments toward her mother boil over into a fierce argument, to which Chen lays out all her cards. As an overbearing mother, Chen can do everything — she can make radical acceptance seem scary; she can make emotional intimacy seem terrifying. She brings a much-needed weight to Ahn’s uneven marriage-plot farce, grounding the film with real stakes.

Ahn and his cast (minus Gladstone, who is filming) came out to a standing ovation after the film ended, a few people in my surrounding area wiping tears off their cheeks. Chen, who popped up in the Vulture studio in a chic baby-blue fur, appeared onstage in sequins — full glam, true legend. When she spoke about her experience with the movie, she immediately launched into a rant about how the young cast absconded off to “eat gummies and giggle.” Despite Bowen Yang’s protests that they were merely Haribos as opposed to something more potent, Chen shook her head. “The PA brought the gummies for them and told me the gummies were not for me,” she explained. The crowd roared and she smiled — a real star, even without the gummies.