THE WEDDING BANQUET (Bleecker Street – April 18): Ang Lee’s 1993 comedy needed to be rethought before it could be remade, since its plot turned on a woman marrying her gay landlord so that she could get a green card and he could placate his parents, since same-sex marriage was illegal. Since that’s no longer (currently) an issue, Andrew Ahn–who co-wrote, as did Lee originally, with James Schamus–had to go to some lengths to create a parallel structure. This time, while Korea-born Min (Han Gi-Chan) has been in a years-long relationship with Chris (Bowen Yang), Chris is commitment-phobic and won’t accept Min’s proposal, so Min makes a deal to obtain his green card by marrying lesbian buddy Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) in exchange for Min financing the IVF treatment for Angela’s girlfriend Lee (Lily Gladstone). It takes a fair amount of screenwriting shoe leather to put all of this into place, but once the characters are on their appointed paths, this Wedding Party is a satisfying remix of its predecessor. As was the case then, things are thrown into chaos when the international parent (here it’s Min’s imperious grandmother, played wonderfully by Minari‘s Youn Yuh-jung) shows up and insists on a traditional Korean wedding banquet, which doesn’t go as planned. Ahn, who directed Fire Island (as well as episodes of Bridgerton), has a feel for clockwork romantic complications that go sideways, and the cast (which also includes Joan Chen as Angela’s mother, who’s made being an LGBT ally part of her professional identity) is charming. It’s particularly nice to see Gladstone play a role where she gets to crack a smile, and Yang is impressively restrained, only occasionally reminding us that’s an expert sketch comic. The Wedding Banquet resolves itself in a way that provides plenty of laughs while saying something about families both biological and found. It’s a tidy, heartfelt piece of craft.
LAST DAYS (no distrib): Justin Lin’s career began at Sundance, with the indie Better Luck Tomorrow. After that, though, he proceeded quickly to the center of the mainstream, directing multiple Fast & the Furious movies as well as successful procedural TV pilots. Last Days is an uneasy attempt to combine the threads of his career, fusing a reflective and upsetting piece of recent history with the technical sheen of his Hollywood projects. The true-life tale, somewhat reminiscent of Into the Wild, follows John Allen Chau (Sky Yang) through the last several years of his life. Like Christopher McCandless, Chau walked away from a respectable middle class life–in his case, a berth at medical school, where he would have followed in the footsteps of his doctor father (Ken Leong)–in pursuit of an obsession. For Chau, the dream was to become a Christian missionary, but not a conventional one–he wanted to go to the most remote and dangerous regions of the world, where the indigenous people had never been exposed to Christianity and killed all intruders. His particular target was North Sentinel Island, off the coast of India, and since the Indian government prohibits outsiders from traveling to the island for their own safety, Chau essentially had to become a spy, eradicating all traces of his religion from his record and journeying to other regions to establish himself as an ordinary tourist before he could finagle his way to a route to his goal. Lin, working from a script by Ben Ripley and with cinematographer Oliver Bokelberg and production designer Jan Roelfs, films these adventures lushly, making them picturesque and exciting even though they’re not really what the story is about. Even more oddly, while Lin and Ripley delve into the father-son relationship, they seem loathe to probe too deeply into Chau’s messianic Christianity, even though that’s what drove him. They’re limited by the fact that some of what’s believed about Chau’s movements come from his journals, which may or may not be reliable, and they’ve invented an Indian detective character searching for Chau to cover some of the exposition. The climactic sequence, which is entirely created by the filmmakers (only those on the island know what actually happened) feels overthought as it tries to make a statement about Chau’s life. In Last Days, Lin appears torn between trying to say something meaningful and delivering an entertaining ride, and he doesn’t fully accomplish either one.
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