Cheating, Love, and Forgiveness: The Wedding Banquet
By Anne Gregg
No family is perfect. Each family is an imperfect quilt often made up of mismatched fabrics sewn together, some with stronger thread than others, some torn at the seam. Families are never perfect because people are not perfect. Andrew Ahn’s remake of The Wedding Banquet unravels a messy quilt of relationships and explores forgiveness, fallibility, and messy queer love.
The Wedding Banquet follows Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) and Lee (Lily Gladstone), a lesbian couple trying to get pregnant through IVF treatments, and Chris (Bowen Yang) and Min (Han Gi-chan), a gay couple on the fence about getting married. Chris and Angela have a con-depentet friendship that started in college. Chris rents Lee and Angela’s garage as a guest house. Min, is a Korean immigrant and heir to a multinational corporation back home. A recent art school graduate, his visa for the United States is about to expire. He asks Chris to marry him and Chris rejects his proposal because he does not want to be responsible for imploding Min’s life — Min’s family is homophobic and his grandfather would cut him off if Min married a man. After Lee’s IVF treatment fails, Min offers to fund another round of it if Angela agrees to marry him so he can obtain a green card (Lee is the executive director of Seattle’s Hometown Pride Social Services and worries the green card marriage would be discovered by the government) beginning an amusing comedy of errors.
The heart of The Wedding Banquet are the relationships the bride and groom-to-be have with their (grand)mothers. Angela’s mother May (Joan Chen) is a PFLAG member and overly supportive. She is very involved in Seattle’s queer community and shares information about her daughter to strangers. May’s allyship oversteps boundaries and embodies the tendency of some queer allies to perform allyship, Their support centers on themselves and not on the queer person. Angela’s mother cut her out of her life when she came out to her. Years later, when her mother re-entered her life as a super ally, she and Angela never talked about her past neglect. Angela loves her mother, so she doesn’t confront her about the past, instead she lets resentment build inside of her.
Angela worries about having children. She fears she will become her mother and will mess up her child like her mother messed her up. Angela refuses to talk about her feelings. Her resentment builds and she lashes out at everyone. Her mother comforts her when everyone else leaves her. Angela opens up to her mother about her fears and her mother tells her she will make mistakes, but as long as she learns from them and loves her child it will be okay.
Min is not out to his family. However, his grandmother, Ja-Young (Youn Yuh-jung) quickly deciphers that Min and Angela’s marriage is a ruse. She knows Min is gay, but she assumed he would grow out of it. Ja-Young agrees to plan the wedding so Min’s grandfather won’t cut him off. As Ja-Young spends time with Min and his friends, she learns how other (grand)parents have supported their kids and realizes she should have been there for Min.
Parents and guardians are not always supportive in the idyllic way we want them to be. They make mistakes that impact the development of their children. In other words, their mistakes manifest in their kids’ personalities. Angela and Min love their (grand)mothers so they forgive them. Their (grand)mothers put in the work and loved them unconditionally through their missteps.
The theme of unconditional love and forgiveness is pushed too far when Angela and Chris cheat on their partners and drunkenly hook up. Angela becomes pregnant with Chris’s baby. Because The Wedding Banquet is a romcom, the story cannot end with the couples breaking up. I assumed the ending will include heartfelt conversations between the two couples and Angela would decide to carry the baby when Lee’s IVF fails. Instead, there are no conversations between the couples, just one grand gesture, and a happily ever after with two children and four parents.
Lee and Min forgive their partners because they love them. They do not confront their partners about cheating on them and then lying about cheating on them. The breach of trust is brushed over for a wacky ‘modern family’ ending. Choosing forgiveness when someone cheats on you in a relationship is a difficult choice, It should not be the expectation. The Wedding Banquet is imperfect like its characters. It delivers two great storylines about love and forgiveness between queer kids and their guardians, but it undermines its own message with its cheating plotline. May and Ja-Young love their (grand)children, they work to remedy their relationships and show their (grand)children how much they love them. Angela and Chris cheating on their partners stretches the theme of forgiveness too far. People are imperfect and messy. Yet, we chose to love anyway. But forgiveness should not be unconditional. Forgiveness takes time and conversation. Forgiveness takes work and love.
About the Author
Anne Gregg is a poet and writer from Northwest Indiana. She is an English Writing major at DePauw University and is the editor-in-chief of her campus’s literary magazine, A Midwestern Review. She is a Media Fellow at her university and loves dissecting how LGBTQ+ people are portrayed in film and tv.
