The Farewell stars Awkwafina as Billi in Lulu Wang’s sophomore, autobiographical feature film “based on an actual lie.” An entire family uses a cover story to visit the grandmother in China so she won’t know that she has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and can enjoy her final days with them. Bring all the tissues! By the end, I was crying, but it won’t end the way that you expect.
How good is The Farewell? I put Wang’s debut feature film in my queue even though I’m totally not into the description. Wang centers Billi without neglecting her supporting characters and conveys the rhythm of a family with a depth of love and without glossing over how family pushes each other’s buttons. Without giving a lot of backstory, Wang credibly depicts her family without a lot of clunky prose so it feels as if the viewers have entered an ongoing story instead of feeling like a TV show or episodic, which is a danger of any drama focusing on family—though I wouldn’t mind if Wang turned her life into a television series. It isn’t a tidy beginning and end, but a dynamic way of framing a life. Wang excels at establishing relationships and personalities and writing dialogue. It feels real.
I went into The Farewell fully expecting the family drama, but was completely taken by surprise when the movie included other solemn goodbyes. Wang also explores the loss of a home that she can never return to as China transforms and runs with open arms into the twenty-first century. There really is a temptation to return and stay, but even if you did, you can never go home because it wasn’t stuck in amber. Your home only exists in your memory, but it has already crumbled into dust and replaced with the latest architectural fad.
Even though Billi is an immigrant, she is also a complete New Yorker. You don’t have to be an immigrant to entertain the thought of giving up and thinking that moving anywhere else is easier if there are other places that you love more. Outside of documentaries, not enough movies address the regrets and misgivings of the immigrant experience-was it worth it? The Farewell isn’t afraid to confront this disillusion. Immigrants get sold on the American dream, but few achieve what he or she imagined, and the chasm between the two may be enough motivation to answer in the negative.
Wang also illustrates how even joyous moments such as dinner with friends or parties feel less resonant, more polite and restrained than when you are with those that you love even during solemn moments. Even though we’ve seen cinematic family gatherings before, The Farewell hits all the right notes that makes the viewers feel what the characters are feeling then juxtaposes it with the people who are not a part of the family, but are living their life nearby. There are some rich, poignant moments during a banquet that shows the face that workers show the revelers then what they do when the revelers are occupied. The reality of daily life anywhere, including China, is not ideal or joyous, but monotonous, especially if you’re at work and eager to go home. These moments feel like brief foils for Billi early in the film as she sees contemporaries and shares a brief, silent glance with a woman at a hotel room. They seem to wonder what the other is feeling. It isn’t the location, but the company and the connection. Also it raises the idea that even though Billi feels as if she is at a nadir in her career, she still has more experiences to draw reserves of creative richness from. In contrast to a brief, joyous exchange in Bushwick with a contemporary who worked the same dead in job that she did, Billi seems to meditate on what life in China would really hold for her if she returned, but her family returned to their respective homes.
The Farewell also deals with the tension between relatives who stay and leave. There is a subtle, constant competition even among strangers regarding which is better: US versus China. For some, it is a fierce competition rooted in validating personal choices, but for others, it is genuine curiosity and a sense of adventure as home, i.e. China, transforms completely. Because Billi did not make the choice and feels tremendous ambivalence about living in NY and away from the home and family that she loves, she has no problem sidestepping this conversation or throwing the US under the bus.
The Farewell also tangles with the idea of ethnic identity among the family members who immigrated. The following is strictly from observation, and I have no idea if Wang was trying to implicitly compare and contrast how immigrant experiences in different countries makes one embrace or table one’s ethnic identity more. The older American immigrants identify as American, not Chinese, because they associate being Chinese with being a citizen of China and are proud of their accomplishment of becoming American citizens whereas a relative who immigrated to another country proudly asserts his Chinese heritage. I am an ignorant American, but I was actually surprised that given long standing historical conflicts, a Chinese person would want to immigrate to that country, especially considering there has never been even a ceremonial apology for the atrocities that country committed against Chinese people so I wasn’t surprised that this relative became more militantly Chinese in the face of what could have been a hostile environment. He would need to draw on the historical strength of his origins to withstand micro aggressions. I was also surprised that the family never seemed to discuss it although when the grandmother said that she fought in the war, it seemed to tie into it and could explain why she easily dismisses one visitor. Please let me know if I’m completely wrong about my outsider reading of these interactions.
The Farewell’s cast is perfect. Awkwafina can act. Diana Lin as her mother steals the show when Shuzhen Zhao, who plays the grandmother, isn’t busy tucking the movie under her arm and running away with it. The entire cast is terrific. If I had to complain about the movie, I wish there was more about the “aunt” who stayed because I wasn’t sure how they were related. Is she an aunt in law or the grandmother’s sister’s daughter? The film is incredibly short so I don’t think that a little more about her character would have hurt the overall story.
The Farewell manages to embrace melodrama while simultaneously taking an interior journey of fully fleshing out different types of loss. This movie is suitable for all viewers, but bring your reading glasses because there are subtitles. I think that it is worth the effort, and you shouldn’t let it dissuade you. It is the second movie of 2019 (the first was The Last Black Man in San Francisco) that got me to cry, which automatically makes me rank it higher than other movies. Give Wang all the money.
