Ang Lee Movie Marathon
Four Ang Lee films in so far. The Wedding Banquet is my favorite, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is a close second, and Eat Drink Man Woman and Life of Pi are tied right after that.
The more I watch, the more I think Ang Lee is a genius director. The twist at the end of Eat Drink Man Woman is absolutely wild — I won't spoil it here. The Wedding Banquet hit even deeper: after watching it, my parents and I talked for a long time, about their own history with their parents, and about my future too.
Eat Drink Man Woman
Ang Lee really loves dropping a big twist right at the end — like in Life of Pi, where the ending tells you the whole story you just watched might have been a lie. Eat Drink Man Woman's ending pulls a similarly wild reversal.
Oh, and that tiger in Life of Pi was way too lifelike — genuinely scared my mom. Wild that film effects were already that good over a decade ago. Looking back on it now, though, that's probably also the starting point of Ang Lee turning into a tech nerd — hard to say if that's been a good thing or a bad thing, but it's basically left him with nothing to actually make movies about these days.
Life of Pi
The Wedding Banquet's ending reveals that the father actually understood English the whole time — he knew the truth all along. But I think these two kinds of twists are doing completely different things. Eat Drink Man Woman's ending is genuinely shocking, but what it's really getting at is that everyone in this family is carrying their own private burden. And the foreshadowing is laid so well — go back and rewatch the opening, and you'll notice the father's "odd" behavior was already there from the very start. The person in the room who most wanted to tell the truth turns out to be him. It's really a kind of subversion, a deconstruction, of patriarchy — because Ang Lee's stories are almost always about a father, especially throughout his Father-Knows-Best trilogy.
The Wedding Banquet really is an excellent film — even thinking back on it now still gives me chills. His command of comedic timing, his unflinching critique of some of the uglier customs baked into Chinese marriage traditions, and then that final reconciliation scene between the two generations. Compared to other similar films, I think it might be the best version of that scene in any East Asian family story I've seen.
After watching it, I ended up talking to my parents about how some of my classmates growing up weren't straight. I asked them: if their own parents found out something like that, what would they think? How would they go on living afterward? I brought up a high school classmate of mine who completely broke off from his parents over exactly this. He put himself through university entirely on his own, earned his own money, and eventually landed a teaching position in a history department. I think what he did is genuinely admirable — but a story like that still starts from a tragedy.
Mostly, though, what my parents and I ended up talking about was what happened around the time they got married. My dad started tearing up partway through, and when I asked why, he said he was just having an allergy attack. My mom backed him up — yeah, he really does tear up from allergies — even though I've never once seen him do that. I nearly lost it trying not to laugh.
It really does track with The Wedding Banquet's own story — a young gay man and a woman who married him under false pretenses. What the mother says to that woman in the film, whether you read it as subtle conditioning or as genuine, heartfelt blessing, is genuinely moving. It's the kind of thing that makes you think about what the older generation actually says when a family is just starting out, and what quietly sincere hopes they're carrying for it.
And it hits even closer to home, honestly — my own uncle went to the US alone to build a life for himself, years ago. I imagine my parents feel all of this on a much deeper level than I do.