Mark Reviews Movies: THE FAREWELL (2019)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 18, 2019

The success of The Farewell is all in its tone. Here's a film about impending death, constant lies, the sinking feeling of not really belonging, and a troubled family's inability or unwillingness to communicate what's actually happening. Somehow, the film is quite funny and, when it isn't directly confronting those aforementioned problems, rather cheery. At one point, a character in writer/director Lulu Wang's semi-autobiographical feature brings up an old Chinese saying: When you have cancer, you die. A couple of other common phrases come to mind in thinking about the film: the concept that bliss comes from ignorance and the notion of whistling past the graveyard.

Wang's screenplay ("based on an actual lie," according to some opening text, which takes on something of a new meaning with the film's final moment, which, in turn, readjusts our thinking about what's really important in this tale) takes on a heavy subject—the illness and almost assured death of a beloved family member. Despite that fact, it mostly looks for joy instead of distress and grief. There's some significant truth to this approach.

To be confronted with such a situation is always cruel. You want to make the best of the time you have left with a loved one—not to mention trying to make the time a loved one has left as happy and painless as possible. You try to go on as if nothing is different, as if time is an expendable commodity, and as if every good-bye is only temporary. You might, at some points, even convince yourself that these little lies, hiding a more despairing reality, are the truth.

Reality will set in again, though—maybe when you're alone or with other friends and family members without the person present or just catching a glimpse of that person in the midst of the charade that nothing is wrong. Everything is wrong. Everything has changed. Time is limited, and every good-bye could be the final one. That dynamic—between necessary or merciful self-deception (or, in this case, outright deception) and the awful truth—is captured here well.

The major hook of Wang's film, though, is that the family, through a cultural tradition that might seem unthinkable to some, is able and even encouraged to keep the news of their loved one's terminal cancer diagnosis from the person afflicted with the disease. The thinking behind the deception comes from that earlier Chinese saying about relationship between cancer and dying. As the same character puts it, it's not the cancer that kills someone. It's the fear.

If one takes away that fear by preventing the knowledge of the disease, perhaps it will help. If it doesn't, at least the person gets to live his or her final months without the cruel knowledge that he or she will die—and sooner than the person might have believed.

At the film's start, we might be of the same opinion on that approach as Billi (Awkwafina), who was born in China but moved to New York City when was she 6 years old. Now in her 30s, Billi is a struggling writer, trying to make it on her own without any help from her father Haiyan (Tzi Ma) and mother Jian (Diana Lin), although she's behind on her rent and has to do laundry and have dinner at the family home.

It's her paternal grandmother, affectionately called Nai Nai (Zhao Shuzhen) by almost everyone in the family, who's diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer. The grandmother's sister, referred to as Little Nai Nai (Lu Hong, who is actually Wang's great-aunt), receives news of the diagnosis from the doctor, who predicts Nai Nai has three months to live—and that might be a generous estimate.

Billi only hears about it after pressing her father. The whole family is planning to come together in China, under the guise of Billi's cousin Hao Hao's (Han Chen, a mostly quiet scene-stealer in barely hiding his sadness) wedding to a woman he has been dating for three months, to see Nai Nai one last time. Despite being told not to go because she wears her emotions on her sleeve, Billi surprises the family—including Haiyan's estranged brother, Hao Hao's father, Haiban (Jiang Yongbo), whose family lives in Japan—with her arrival at Nai Nai's apartment. Seeing her grandmother for the first time in decades, Billi struggles with the family's decision.

Wang approaches the obvious (the moral/ethical question of the family's choice, how this news affects each member of the family, and how this hiding of such significant information isn't exactly out of character for a family who routinely evades little and big truths) and less apparent (the underlying tensions of the family being apart for over two decades, why that separation might have occurred, and Billi's uncertainty about her place in the world, which is less involving than simply witnessing the family dynamics on display) elements of this story. All the while, the filmmaker uncovers the humor within the particulars of the deception, without undermining the real quandary if the lie is "good" or simply denying Nai Nai a choice in her final months, and the characters, without downplaying the real grief they're experiencing.

It's a considerable act of narrative and tonal juggling that's thought-provoking (The family makes a good case for their deception), patient, equally observant of its characters and of matters of cultural specificity, and, through it all, funny and, at times, achingly sad. From the premise, The Farewell might seem to be about saying good-bye, but the film itself, decidedly re-affirmed in its final moment, is about embracing whatever and however much time we have left with loved ones.

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