Directed by: Lulu Wang
Starring: Awkwafina, Shuzhen Zhao, Tzi Ma, Diana Lin
Rated PG, 100 minutes
If all fictional stories, at their cores, are well-told lies, then “The Farewell” is the best-told lie of them all. Before even the opening credits roll, a title card greets us with the coy warning, “Based on an actual lie.” The comedic drama, which follows a Chinese family’s decision not to tell its own matriarch that she’s terminally ill, is based on writer-director Lulu Wang’s (“Posthumous”) own experience; six years ago, her family decided not to tell her grandmother about her illness, choosing instead to stage a fake wedding so that everyone could come visit one last time under a happier pretense.
It’s a surprising premise, and in many ways this is a surprising movie. For starters, Awkwafina, playing the sick matriarch’s adoring granddaughter, Billi, stars in a lead dramatic role for the first time. While Awkwafina usually plays the quick-talking comic relief—her biggest role to date was in “Crazy Rich Asians,” a flashy movie of which she was the flashiest part—“The Farewell” finds her in more drab circumstances: jet lagged after a long flight, hiking up the stairwell in a hotel where the elevator is broken, crawling on her hands and knees to look for a dropped earring. Her antics are muted, her sharp mannerisms dulled by the impending loss that sits like a storm cloud over the movie. She is still a wildly expressive actress, though; her facial expressions, at any given moment, are impossible to predict, her line readings uniquely hers.
Even more of a surprise (at least, to most American viewers) is Shuzhen Zhao, the Chinese TV and stage actress who plays the dying woman, Nai Nai. Zhao’s screen presence is forceful but loving, brutally honest but generous, and endearing in every scene. And as the family commits more and more to its lie, Nai Nai accepts what they tell her without question. In her performance, though, Zhao offers just a hint of suspicion, suggesting—though never confirming—that she’s going along with a lie she knows she’s being told. In one scene, she reads over a medical report that the others have edited to say the tumors are benign; Nai Nai gives everyone at the table a shrewd, interrogating look, but finally says, “I told you I was fine!”
The movie is full of precise and telling details like this, contradictions and juxtapositions that Wang drops like breadcrumbs to lead us along. Birds appear on windowsills; characters repeat themselves, over and over, even to say the most obvious of sentences; there is a great deal of food, but little eating. Characters cry hardest while surrounded by festivities, and in the one scene where someone cries in a graveyard, it’s a professional crier, someone hired by the family to provide wailing lamentations so they can focus on leaving offerings of food and cigarettes on the grave they’ve come to visit. There is never a convenient way to grieve, nor a convenient time or place, but Wang, with generosity and compassion, affords her characters—her own family—the freedom to do what they must, where they must.
The family’s grief and its expressions serve as a compelling setting for the moral question at the heart of the movie, which Wang poses plainly: is it right to lie to a dying person? Is it fair to decide what they can know about their own lives, to deny them their final preparations? Wang’s answer is given just as plainly. She frames it as a cultural distinction: in the East, the family bears the burden of sorrow, even if it means going to great lengths to lie; in the West, the idea of doing that to someone feels more scandalous.
That Wang’s grandmother is still alive (as explained during the end credits) and unaware of this movie’s subject is testament both to the power of film as a therapeutic medium, a way of coping with grief before we have to cope, as well as to the deeply personal connection Wang makes with her audience. This may be a quiet movie, one that thrives on its simple details and on the evident loving care given it by its cast and crew, but it’s the most daring movie that has come out this year because of the weight of that central lie, and what it means, as a viewer, now to be in on it.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 8/23/19.