The Farewell (2019) - Movie Review

I’ve gotten into this a fair bit in past reviews, but suffice to say, I really can’t stand Liar Revealed plots. The ones where the entire story hinges on characters intentionally keeping secrets from each other, mainly for the sake of giving the third act a chance to engage through breaking the artificial tension created. It’s incredibly distracting to see in pretty much any movie, as it turns whatever comes after the deceptive moment into a prolonged waiting game. It’s tedious, and the kind of narrative nonsense that can turn me right off from properly enjoying a work of fiction. Enter this film, where none of the usual gripes apply.

The story itself is also built around a single brand of deception, in this case being Billi and her family deciding not to tell their matriarch Nai Nai (played brilliantly by Shuzhen Zhao) that she has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Lulu Wang’s script is built entirely on this continued act, but where it sharply differs from the usual is how the lie itself is treated. Most times, the weight of carrying a secret like that is only part of the performances, or maybe the subtext at best, but here, it makes up a hefty amount of the emotional impact.

It’s basically treated as an extension of traditional Chinese culture, an act of carrying the burden of the news in the stead of the one who it most affects. A lot of the dialogue consists the different perspectives in regards to this, from wanting to be honest about a very serious topic to seeing the lie as a form of mercy. It marks probably the only time I’ve seen this plot point used in a way that puts genuine thought and care into its implications, and it makes for some quite gratifying trope-defying viewing. It even allows for some good morbid comedy, like when the family go to the grave of Nai Nai's husband and argue about how to properly prepare the food offerings they're leaving him.

It also serves as the crux of a much larger conversation regarding the differences between Chinese and American cultures, a topic that leads to what may be the single most uncomfortable conversation I’ve seen all year where the family ask Billi whether the United States is better than China. You must be fucking dreaming if you think I’m even going to approach that question, let alone try and answer it. The family itself consists mainly of those born in China, with the rare outlier like Billi who emigrated to the U.S., and the way that future prospects for happiness and prosperity are examined through both lenses shows some nice complexity in its showing of cultural frictions.

But more than anything else, the spectre of death looms large over this entire production, as this really does put the melancholy at the forefront. Lulu Wang’s direction and Anna Franquesa Solano’s camera work allow for some very crisp framing, aided by how on-point the acting is throughout (my word, Awkwafina stakes her claim as a serious acting talent with this one), and Alex Weston’s musical score is achingly mournful, acting like the voice in the cast’s collective heads to remind them that the time for mourning looms near.

This is just a beautiful movie, more than anything else. It’s a look at mortality, cultural relations and the weight of human guilt that starts out on an ostensibly clichéd note, but actively sets out to dodge triteness every single moment afterwards. And when the themes start to truly merge, it’s like watching someone mourn the end of their connection to their own culture; it’d be fucking heartbreaking, and it definitely reaches that point at times, but the grace and precision with which it’s delivered gives it an ideal balance of social discomfort and existential discomfort.