With such a generic title and serving as a remake, it’d be easy to write off The Wedding Banquet as a routine romantic comedy of screwball schemes. While the film remains relatively faithful to Ang Lee’s original film in premise, a surprising amount of heart is injected into what could have been a mindless romp of marriage madness. It’s the type of film that can laugh at the absurdity of covering up your homosexuality while still recognizing the real anxieties that come with coming out to your family.

Two couples find themselves utilizing a marriage of convenience to either maintain their lifestyle or take the next step. Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) and Lee (Lily Gladstone) want to have a baby, but they struggle to make it work with procedures that keep failing. Chris (Bowen Yang) and Min (Han Gi-chan) want to get married, but Min has cold feet and a fear of revealing his relationship to his family. With Min’s immigration status set to expire soon, a sham marriage to Lee could secure him a Green Card and alleviate the pressure. But the event is complicated by everything from a wise family member (Youn Yuh-jung) learning the truth early and an accidental pregnancy that is thankfully treated with a balance of moral concern and silly shock.

A film like this could easily coast on fabrication, but it stands out for how it breathes honesty from the start. There’s some strong chemistry with the snarky Yang and pensive Gi-chan acting like a couple too nervous to propose. It’s easy to laugh at Min’s almost cartoonish levels of wincing when trying to pull off a Green Card marriage, but it’s a sadness tinged with relatable sadness. Tran and Gladstone also have this wholesome dynamic of a couple so ready for motherhood that it’s genuinely depressing when pregnancies fail. A lesser film might’ve tiptoed around this troubling angle or chucked into the bin of melodrama, but there’s plenty of confidence in a movie like this to make the characters real enough that the idea of pregnancy is handled with a genuine flow.

The relationships outside of the romantic are also rather compelling. Tran and Yang have a friendship they fear is going to be threatened by this sham marriage and maybe even rockier when a baby enters the picture. But they handle even the most catastrophic of developments with a surprising amount of heart and charm. It makes the easy moments of comedy like them trying to de-gay their house all the more hilarious with lines like “Why is everything in this house so gay!” more funny than routine. I also really admired the earnestness Gi-han has with his elder Yuh-jung, where she decides to help with the marriage, but only because of how loveless past traditions turned out to be. I just love nearly every character in this plot because they all possess intelligence and humility. Even when we arrive at the Korean wedding ceremony, there is an admission by those hosting the event that they are not familiar with the full context of every symbolic gesture. There’s some adorable ignorance with the community these folks fear, and it leads to a solid joke about non-binary representation.

The Wedding Banquet is a well-balanced rom-com of savory screwball antics and nutritious queer marriage drama. With a cast of Asian actors in queer roles, it’d be so easy for a comedy to stumble into a series of stereotypes or gags about poking at those stereotypes. But there’s a healthy dose of reality in this film to avoid feeling like another mindless diversion of wild wedding mishaps. The cast is in top form as they put their best foot forward, but it helps that they’re working with a script that treats them more as human beings, rather than props for jokes about being misled or throwing up during a wedding ceremony. This is a film that can have Kelly Marie Tran puke all over Han Gi-chan and still make you care about them beyond how messy they end up in the end.