Lily Gladstone, known for her Oscar-nominated role in Killers of the Flower Moon as well as outstanding performances in acclaimed films like Certain Women and Fancy Dance, is an artist whose dedication to the craft of filmmaking extends to all facets of her work. This is true once more with her latest film, The Wedding Banquet. A delightful Seattle-set romantic comedy that radically reimagines Ang Lee's 1993 Chinese classic of the same name, this version more than makes the story its own.
Key to this is Gladstone as Lee, the charismatic and loving partner to Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) who is taking part in a fake marriage so they can get the funds to have a baby through IVF. Angela is marrying Min (Han Gi-chan) so that he can get a green card and continue to stay in the country with his boyfriend Chris (Bowen Yang) while keeping his sexuality a secret from his family. It's complicated and, of course, soon spirals out of control.
Having grown up in the Seattle area, Gladstone was committed to making the film as grounded in place as possible. Though it was originally set in Los Angeles, she said there was a rewrite for it to be set in Seattle and shot in neighboring Vancouver. This provided an opportunity for her to load up her car to serve as the movie's unofficial location scout, personally taking director Andrew Ahn and cinematographer Ki Jin Kim through the Seattle spots that were the right inspirations for the film.
"I was so happy when it was rewritten for Seattle because immediately I knew that Lee's office is on Capitol Hill, maybe above Northwest Film Forum where I used to go all the time," Gladstone says. "I showed them the Wildrose, the bar where Angela and Lee probably met."
Gladstone said she also wanted to bring in an Indigenous narrative and make her character Duwamish, connecting to the history of community, as well as their battles against gentrification, in the area.
"It was really a gift for the filmmakers to get this really quick, tight little circle tour of Seattle," Gladstone says. "That really helped in choosing locations in Vancouver that felt authentic."
However, just as critically as all this, Gladstone said that "her last bottom line as a Seattleite" was that the film would be incomplete without a Dick's Drive-In reference in there somewhere.
"As you're making a queer film, we need to have a bag of dicks joke in there somewhere," Gladstone said. "And Dick's was totally into it! They sent production Dick's bags, all of the foils to wrap the prop burgers."
There was a Dick's detail that had to be fixed that came up in a key improvised scene midway through when Angela feeds Lee food. Gladstone noticed it was a crinkle-cut fry. She made sure this was fixed and a "Dick's appropriate fry" was swapped in for the final take. After all, as someone committed to authenticity in her art, Gladstone knows "there's no fries like Dick's fries."
But for all the jokes and fries, there's also depth to The Wedding Banquet. One flooring scene in the film where both immense pain and an enduring sliver of joy come right up to the surface plays out in an unspoken moment Lee has in a garden with Angela. Though this was originally written with dialogue, Gladstone said that it became something that worked better with just the two characters sharing an unspoken yet deeply felt understanding together.
"I was really happy to get there because you feel like you earn it, to a degree, working with a director you haven't worked with before and they see what you do, what Kelly did, what the two of us were able to do together. I love it when you watch a film or when you read a script, and it gets stripped back to very minimal dialogue because film is a visual language," Gladstone says. "It's such a ridiculous scenario and situation, how can you even talk about it? There are no words to parse through everything going on in that scene. It was just such a gift."
Gladstone had been putting feelers out looking for a romantic comedy, as all her favorite actors had done one, and it was definitely something she wanted for her own career. Once it materialized, the experience of making this ensemble romantic comedy was appreciated not only for all the laughs, but for the film's timely, lived-in story.
"This was a world that I could see myself in," Gladstone says. "It's reality about socioeconomic status, gentrification, queerness, identity, immigration, belonging to place, and belonging to community."
Many of the communities central to The Wedding Banquet (including immigrants and queer folks) are under renewed attack, and tackling these topics through a film that's funny and honest is critical to survival.
"Joy is resistance. Existence is resistance," Gladstone says. "Accepting our worth and celebrating it in the face of a new culture that's trying to suppress it again. It's a little naive to think that went anywhere, it's just a little louder now than when we were making the film." ♦
The Wedding Banquet Opens in theaters on April 17.
