The Farewell begins with a flurry of fibs. Billi (Awkwafina), a young woman living in New York, is walking down a Manhattan street when her China-based grandmother (Zhao Shuzhen), aka Nai Nai, calls for a catch-up. It quickly becomes clear that they love each other deeply, but as the exchange ping-pongs back and forth across the Pacific, the deceit begins. Yes, Billi says, she’s wearing a hat (she’s not). Nai Nai claims she’s snug at home (she’s in a sterile hospital ward). And so on.
These are, of course, white lies, the type anyone would say to allay another person’s fears and make them feel better. But what The Farewell has on its mind is whether it’s really okay to keep secrets from people, even if it’s seemingly in their own interest. Because soon the film’s big dramatic hook is established: Nai Nai has terminal lung cancer, with maybe three weeks to live, and her family decide not to tell her. Instead, Billi and her parents fly to China to join the rest of the clan, with the cover story of attending a wedding that’s been hastily organised, but actually to share Nai Nai’s final days, without ever letting on that they’re grieving. Can they keep their rictus smiles fixed to their faces? Or will someone break under the pressure?
It’s a powerful set-up that happens to be based on truth. Writer-director Lulu Wang went through this very experience when her own grandmother got cancer, discovering that in China even doctors will keep up the pretence. Wang first recounted her kin’s plight in documentary form, as an episode of radio programme This American Life. Turning it into a lightly fictionalised feature film, it turns out, was an inspired move. Each member of the extended family is drawn with sharpness and humour, making them a pleasure to hang with. Nai Nai herself is as benevolent and dignified as the Queen, but with a nice line in acidic put-downs, especially when it comes to the gawky bride-to-be (Aoi Mizuhara). Billi’s mother, Jian (Lin), at first seems to be stolid to the point of passionless, but slowly reveals herself to have a beating heart, after all. And even characters with slight screentime, like Nai Nai’s shambling oddball of a live-in boyfriend, stick in the memory.
The core of the film, though, is Billi herself — the Wang substitute played by Awkwafina. Funnily enough, The Farewell has the same basic plot as Awkwafina’s breakthrough movie, Crazy Rich Asians, with a Chinese-American woman returning to China from New York for a wedding. But otherwise the two films couldn’t be more different, and the rapper-turned-actor follows up her exuberantly eccentric role in that 2018 comedy with a remarkable, subdued performance. Her Billi is visibly wrestling with her emotions, trying to stop herself from yelling out the truth. Every person has a different outlet for their suppressed emotions — her father turns to alcohol, while Billi is only able to express how she feels through the piano, and the scene where she finally plinks the keys, sharing the music with her Nai Nai, is deeply moving.
In other hands, this material could have been melodramatic and soapy. Instead, there’s an enchanting mingling of comedy and melancholy, in a series of small set-pieces that feel emotionally big. In one delightful sequence, the family visit the grandfather’s gravesite for prayer and offerings (“Don’t give him cigarettes — he quit!” somebody snaps). In another, Billi and Nai Nai converse as photos of the groom and bride are taken behind them, hilarious bits of business happening in the background. Wang brings her experience to bear in the specificities of small moments, like the frenzy of Chinese taxi drivers vying for business at the airport, or the murals of nature that appear throughout the movie — themselves, in a way, little white lies.
The symbolic birds that flutter into frame at certain key moments are a little unnecessary. And the coda at the end does somewhat undercut what’s come before. But The Farewell is truly one of the most pleasant surprises of 2019 so far: a big, warm, lovely hug of a film. And that’s no lie.
