A right mixture of elements both from Taiwanese and American perspectives is one of the reasons contributing to the great success of The Wedding Banquet, like what the director Ang Lee always jokes that his filmmaking style is ‘Yasujiro Ozu meets Billy Wilder.’ The movie is neither purely Asian American nor purely Chinese but is a hybrid movie that serves to connect the two cinemas.
Different from regular Hollywood film, The Wedding Banquet is uniquely featured with Taiwanese characteristics. It is produced in Taiwan, starring the Taiwanese actor Sihung Lung, who is the father of Wai Tung and showing the Confucian family facing different challenges. The Wedding Banquet forms what has been called Lee 's "Father Knows Best" trilogy, on top of Ang Lee’s other two movies: Pushing Hands and and Eat Drink Man Woman. These three films all depict the family in Confucius belief that struggles with modernity. In an American perspective, The Wedding Banquet ‘s central character, Wai-Tung, a naturalized Taiwanese young man living in New York, sees his parents’ culture and values as foreign to his own belief.
From New York Times, Stephan Holden wrote,’ Wai Tung is a culturally divided soul. His American half is a dapper
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Contrast to the regular Hollywood movies, in The Wedding Banquet,the Asian parents are well educated, know English and open to accept that their son is gay; the Asian American, Wai Tung, is muscular who always goes to gym and enjoys a high social status as he is the boss of a real-estate agent company; the White is gentle, nice and gay who knows to cook Chinese dish. In addition, E Marino commented that the movie’s set of characters do not abide to the stereotypical image an American audience would