The Farewell

I’ve been dying to see The Farewell since I heard it existed months and months ago. I won’t lie.  I started getting interested in an Awkwafina as an actress when an immense, nationwide marketing push told me relentlessly, “You are going to fall in love with Awkwafina as an actress!”  (Every movie theater promo, every entertainment magazine/blog/vlog, every random Facebook ad, every miskeyed Google search!  You’ve got a great publicist, Awkwafina!)  I thought all this buzz seemed a little overblown when I actually saw her in Ocean’s 8, but then I watched her steal every scene in Crazy Rich Asians and changed my mind.  Awkwafina’s great, so the positive buzz for The Farewell coming out of Sundance got my attention fast.  Awkwafina as a potential Oscar nominee for Best Actress?  Sign me up to see that movie!  “When it opens here,” I thought, “I’ll be the first to buy a ticket.”

Then I couldn’t see it right away because I was in Disney World, but I’ve finally seen it now (using Moviepass to buy a ticket minutes before the screening), and to my delight, The Farewell lives up to the hype.  The Farewell is a fantastic film.  If you’re thinking about seeing it, you should.  Without reservations, I can recommend it to a broad audience.  The worst thing that could happen is you don’t like it as much as you hoped.  But this is never going to be a movie that provokes storming out of the theater demanding money back.  It’s a beautiful film about how families come together while trying to cope with loss.  (A trigger warning, though–if your family very recently suffered through the loss of a loved one, you may find the themes here uncomfortable. This is a beautiful film about a loving family, but they’re a family struggling with the matriarch’s stage four cancer diagnosis.)

The entire cast is excellent, but since she is the lead, Awkwafina is the standout as Billi, born in China, raised in New York, trying to wrap her head around the Chinese custom of protecting a loved one by keeping her in the dark about her own cancer diagnosis.  Could Awkwafina get an Oscar nomination for this performance?  Yeah.  I haven’t seen any of the competition yet (or if I have, she’s winning for sure), but Awkwafina definitely puts her range as a dramatic actress on full display in this nuanced, non-showy performance.

The Good:

The entire concept of the film is eye opening to me. Yes, being aware of having stage four cancer would be a crushing weight to bear. But simply keeping this information from the patient is truly shocking by Western standards.  In this country, thorny, restrictive laws make it nearly impossible to find out someone else’s medical information (even if you are that person’s caregiver).  Apparently, in China, a doctor lying to a patient’s face about her own diagnosis is not only not illegal but expected and encouraged.  As long as someone in the family knows the truth, the physician himself can tell the patient a comfortable lie.

At first, this sounds a little bonkers to a Western ear, maybe even dangerous, sinister.  (I have actually encountered Americans who take this approach to a loved one’s health before, but I personally have always regarded keeping people in the dark about their own health problems vexing at best.)  Initially, this sounds like a quirky, eccentric approach that may, in fact, mask some sort of insidious Rosemary’s Baby type scenario.  The Farewell lets us experience the strangeness of this situation along with Awkwafina’s Billi, a character who left China when she was a very young child and now finds her Chinese family’s traditions as strange as any other New Yorker would.  She’s an Alice in Wonderland style protagonist, journeying to a world she doesn’t quite understand.  And we experience the wonder, confusion, frustration, and fear along with her.  The difference is, just over halfway through, this Alice remembers that she’s actually from Wonderland, and we learn that the initial journey away from her home was just as strange and disorienting for her as the journey back.

As an American with no Chinese heritage, I appreciated the way Billi’s character invites us into the story.  She’s so easy for us to identify with at the beginning because she’s an outsider, too.  The really great thing is that because we identify with Billi so early on, we accompany her on the rest of her emotional journey, too.  We come to understand the culture of Billi’s family more and more.  Eventually, we feel the embrace of her family, too.  By the end, we really feel like we “get” them.  We feel like we’re a part of the family.  That’s a wonderful technique for introducing a new culture to American audiences in a positive way.

When I first heard the premise of this film, I thought, “That’s quirky and wild!  How crazy!  When will this lie unravel?  What’s going to happen in that moment when the grandmother realizes the truth?”  But I left the movie feeling like I understood this family and appreciated a part of their culture that I had never even known about before.  So that’s really cool.

We keep hearing (and some of us, saying) that the movie industry needs to be more inclusive.  Actually, I’ve heard all my life (before even this present moment) that we need to hear new voices in both literature and film.  We need to hear women’s stories.  We need to hear stories from people of various ethnic/cultural/religious/social backgrounds.  The Farewell is the kind of film this push for inclusiveness is meant to give us.  This is not a movie about someone imagining what it must like to be Chinese American.  

Writer/director Lulu Wang has a lot in common with the film’s protagonist, and The Farewell is inspired by the true story of Wang’s actual grandmother.  And when you let people tell their own stories, you suddenly get stuff you haven’t heard before millions of times.  Not only is it helpful in practical ways to learn to understand other cultures and points of view, it’s also just flat out more entertaining because it’s novel.  You get an element of surprise, and you don’t even need a convoluted twist.  The twist is, you don’t know anything about Chinese culture, so of course, as the story unfolds, you will be surprised!  (And did you know that Lulu Wang is dating Barry Jenkins?  That’s a pairing that’s easy to understand.  They both make such beautiful films.)

At the same time, the story is also incredibly familiar, intimate, personal, and the kind of thing that every human can relate to easily.  There’s nothing strange or disorienting about the heart of this movie.  I’ve lost a loved one.  I’ve had a grandmother.  I’ve moved away from my family home when I was very young, missed my family, and then struggled to reconnect while feeling like an outsider and straining to recall a way of life barely written on my conscious memory.  Everybody has a family.  And while it’s possible that not everybody has loved a grandmother, surely everybody has loved someone.  These are primal, universal themes.  (And I personally strongly related to what Billi’s mother says about crying at funerals.)

Maybe Awkwafina will win an Oscar!  (I doubt that, but a nomination certainly seems within reach.  Will she be nominated as Awkwafina or Nora Lum?)  Surely her Oscar clip would be the scene she plays on the floor, the conversation with her mother just after they find a lost earring.  And she’s supported by the best ensemble cast anyone could ask for. Shuzhen Zhao who plays Nai Nai (the grandmother) is amazing.  I loved her lively, nuanced performance.  Like Awkwafina, she incorporates the best parts of comedy and drama into almost every scene.  In other words, she made me laugh and cry, often at the same time.  If this movie is actually going to get Oscar nominations, I hope she gets one, too.  She’s marvelous.

The director’s great aunt, Nai Nai’s sister, plays herself in the film.  This is also really incredible.  I wish I had known that while watching the movie.  She has a huge part, and it explains why the video clip of the director’s actual grandmother in the credits looks so much like the actresses playing her and her sister.  One of them really is her sister!  (I think her dog is actually played by her dog, too!)

Other standouts in the cast for me were Diana Lin as Billi’s mother and Tzi Ma who plays Billi’s father (and also General Shang in the movie Arrival.  He was one of the few supporting cast members I recognized, actually.  He’s in literally everything.  In fact, my mom is at this moment watching a show on amazon called Wu Assassins, and he’s in that.  He’s probably also in the game my son is playing on his tablet.  He’s really having a moment.) Honestly, the entire cast is very strong.

The film also has a lovely score by Alex Weston.

Best Scene:

The scene with the lazy Susans on the rotating table is just fantastic.  You know it’s family dinner because everyone is sharing, eating from the same dishes, and yet they’re all at each other’s throats.

I also love just about every interaction Billi has with her grandmother.  My favorite is the story about the eggs.

Best Action Sequence:

It’s a major turning point in the movie when Awkwafina’s character bursts out of the reception hall and runs away.

Best Scene Visually:
I love the way the movie uses birds. Saying more would probably be a spoiler. I know my own grandmother always used to say that when a bird flies into the house, it means there’s been a death.  (I think that was it.  She knew a lot of superstitions about birds.  Certainly the birds around our house died at alarming rates because first she threw out bread for the birds, and then she put out dishes of food for stray cats.  I don’t think she ever noticed the irony.  She loved animals.)  Anyway, I really like the payoff of all these bird metaphors.

Also visually captivating and immensely intriguing is the scene in the cemetery.

The Negatives:

I’ve heard this movie describe itself (in its own advertising) as a comedy.  If that’s true, it will certainly help it at the Golden Globes, but I would call it a drama.  Yes, it’s funny.  But it’s a comedy in the way that the interactions of large families during times of stress or tragedy are always funny later or from a distance.  My own family has gathered for a lot of funerals.  We had about a ten-year run there where somebody died nearly every other day.  (At least it felt like that.)  Times of enforced closeness like this always give birth to hilarious anecdotes, but at the same time, you are gathering together because someone is probably dying.  This is a very funny movie, but it finds real-life humor in difficult situations.  So okay, yes, maybe it’s a comedy.  But don’t go expecting to laugh out loud nonstop.

To be perfectly honest, I have no idea why anyone would dislike this movie.  Some people might find it boring, I suppose, no explosions, time travel, fight choreography, pirates, velociraptors.  It’s just a movie about a family.  Still, it’s easily one of the best films I’ve seen all summer.

Overall:

Before The Farewell, I had never heard of writer/director Lulu Wang, and now I’m excited about her future films.  I’m definitely also eager to see more of Awkwafina, which is fortunate since she is everywhere right now.  The Farewell is a beautiful film about family, and I don’t see how anyone couldn’t fall in love with it just like I did.  It’s easily one of this summer’s strongest films.  You should watch it.