The Farewell

There is sometimes a tone of moral instruction on This American Life that leaves me cold—perhaps because the role of the storyteller and the role of the interpreter are folded into one. On occasion, segments that are useful for children may seem like humanist sermons to adults. Ambiguities are extracted and brushed into life lessons: smooth little gems of wisdom.

Lulu Wang’s The Farewell originated as an autobiographical sketch on the public-radio show; and, at times, it cranks out exposition as if introducing the audience to the concept of multiculturalism. That being said, the story is so elemental that if terms like “dramatic irony” didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent them. Billi (Awkwafina) moved to the United States at an early age. When she discovers that her grandmother (Zhao Shuzhen) is dying, she returns to China to say goodbye but learns that it is customary to withhold terminal diagnoses from elderly relatives. Thus, the family reunites to grieve behind Nai Nai’s back, while she is chipper as ever.

The movie satisfies a genuine curiosity to see some semblance of ordinary life in China. Billi’s Americanized sensibility seems, at times, manipulated to pitch the point of view to that of a well-meaning if ignorant tourist, but Wang’s similarly well-meaning (and perhaps necessary) didacticism finds balance with her talent for observation. She is casual with regard to Billi’s father’s latent alcoholism—an old habit dressed up as his family tradition. Billi’s mother, on the other hand—played by Diana Lin with just a spritz of vinegar—has less patience for such traditions and is implied to have been the driving force in moving the family abroad. But she returns to form as well, putting her soused husband to bed like wet socks into a dryer.

Lanky in movement rather than build, Awkwafina has a Chaplinesque physicality; she has both a lightness and a tendency to be weighed down, with a face like an empathic sinkhole—sucked in by mourning. Shuzhen, vital save for the shock of white hair that edges her closer to a living ghost, seems a poignant visual counterpart: grounded, beaming with practicality. (It may be implicit that, if she knew about her cancer, she would take it in stride, rendering her family’s macabre self-sacrifice a charade.) Nai Nai’s solidity is reason enough to make Billi, herself a sort of ghost minted out of cultural displacement, consider leaving her American life behind.

The sketchiness of that life, I think, is one of the movie’s weaknesses. In New York City, Billi is some indeterminate species of creative striver, and the film cannily avoids asking whether that life—she applies for but fails to attain a Guggenheim Fellowship—would be available to her, or anyone else, in the so-called People’s Republic. Further, it never seems to rise to a consciously thematic level that the practice of not telling loved ones that they are dying of an incurable disease is rooted in a pre-globalized world, one in which relatives didn’t have to be flown in from thousands of miles away to stage a bogus wedding in order to propagate the illusion. I don’t recall the film suggesting that such folkways are doomed to vanish.

If The Farewell, which was shot in the city where Wang’s family lives in China with a Mandarin-speaking cast, is a little too assiduous in avoiding controversy, this could have been at the behest of Chinese censors—or the implied censorship of screening for the Chinese market. However, Wang’s democratic inclinations filter through the visuals. One can hardly feel like a tourist among the ugly skyrises that literally lifted people out of poverty a generation or two back: an ascent caustically stunted by a hotel elevator that seems permanently out of service. Wang and Anna Franquesa Solano, the cinematographer, tint everything green, like exposed copper. More to the point, the camera will circle a table, giving each person seated a fair shake while molding the family unit into a character in and of itself.

During a drinking game at the fake wedding, the camera gets the spins, and Billi’s cousin (Chen Han) breaks down and sobs. It is a payoff that his silent, sulking presence, and Wang’s pacing, have primed us for. Hao Hao is the sham groom, and—with this gesture—one gets inside his emotional burden, and it has the effect of the last domino falling. (We never get very close to his Japanese-born sham bride—for whom this custom must be as arcane as it is for Billi. It’s never revealed, for example, whether her family plays along.) By this point, at a wedding that is really a funeral, where one shares the dance floor with the unknowingly deceased, Wang is in rich, full command of irony—a touching and universal prank on grief.