The Farewell is based on a radio story by director Lulu Wang first aired on This American Life three years ago. Even at the time that radio show felt like a special moment, like hearing Adnan Sayed’s case for the first time. Someone had found a gem of a story, reported it with intimacy and patience and found this odd little cultural quirk and a clever workaround that was both funny and gut-wrenching at the same time. The story took up the first half of the show, which showed how much confidence the producers had in it, but at the same time it felt a little too soon for an adaptation, a little derivative, and possibly a little bit out of typecast for Awkwafina. Whenever the trailer played before indie films this summer, I rolled my eyes and assented to hate watching it. But even if I’m two weeks late on reporting for duty, I’m here to sound the horn in favor of this film. It really is an excellent meditation on what it means to live stretched across two cultures, and in addition it’s just generally a genuinely good film about a wedding and all of the emotions of loss and regret and hope that are mixed into these focal points of family.
The film diverges in some important ways from the original radio story, by putting Awkwafina at the center of the story in a way that feels smart and timely, giving voice to the millennial’s cultural struggle in all of its many facets. The original story had Lulu as a sort of audience surrogate but the bulk of the talking came by way of her parents, but by drawing the story’s narrative center to Billi, we get a fresh reinvention of the original storytelling.
Billi’s binational perspective, someone who experiences Chinese culture separate and apart from her ethnic identity only infrequently, is just the sort of character we need more of, stories that have been sorely needed. The lack of information that passes between Billi’s mother and her serves as a nimble metaphor for the disrupted flow of cultural knowledge and experiences, the struggle of maintaining connections and feeling linked to one’s community. Billi must trust that her mother knows best when she’s withholding her in-law’s cancer diagnosis, even as Billi struggles with the fact that in the past her mother has not been forthcoming about other important family matters like her maternal grandfather’s health.
UPDATE (Sept 15): One of the things I’ve been thinking more about this year is the way in which films like The Farewell, Blinded by the Light (forthcoming review), and Wild Rose give us a way of talking about the best aspects of America. It made me think about a film from last year, Heaven Without People, an excellent whodunit out of Dubai, that did some similar things in terms of opening up conversations about the American experience through the frame of the immigrant. Totally recommend you check out this film if you’re at all interested in this phenomenon.
Health in general is handled in delicate and thoughtful ways in the film to build on the complexity of characterization, from the stilted and very funny conversation between Billi and her uncle on her first night in China to subtle intimations of Billi’s father’s alcohol problem, never quite voiced beyond the occasional comment by his mother, his daughter, his wife. These little quirks are replete throughout the film. Wang’s ability to create a running gag out of the complete lack of chemistry between the married couple is genius. The great aunt’s wardrobe, rolling deep in leopard print and the omnipresent Presbyterian Church of Zimbabwe jacket makes her the OG fashion icon we needed but did not deserve.
One of the things that I was worried about from the trailer was the way in which this story might be spun to seem like a common trope about the foreignness of Chinese grief, the “unemotional Oriental,” something that any person who has grown up in an Asian family or Asian community like myself bristles at when we see ourselves characterized as such by outsiders. In the trailer we see Billi–hilariously–trying to restrain her emotions, overplaying her poker face in an attempt to abide by her family’s wishes. In a lot of ways this works well in the film generally. Awkwafina is a comic actor and the situation she finds herself in The Farewell is tragicomic. She looks comically uncomfortable playing it straight and serious, the ever-constant slouch much in the same vein as Maya Hawke’s Robin in Stranger Things. If anything, the film does a lot to show how similar China and America are concerning the struggles they have with their emotional impulses, even if their reactions are different.
The Farewell succeeds in the way that it lives with the complicated messiness of life. The male boarder who “isn’t helping” Grandma gives Billi a chance to ask her if she’s still sexually active, whether she ever felt the urge to find companionship after the death of her husband, and gives us a chance to see another shade of love, its “austere and lonely offices,” as Robert Hayden puts it. The existence of the boarder also lets some steam out of the grandmother’s constant drumbeat for Billi to find a man. The hypocrisy of his presence heads off criticism of the stereotypical matriarch urging her younger generation to shack up. The grandmother is cognizant about the need for career (she’s served in the military, gained the respect of formerly high-up members in local politics), even as she gently advocates for the advantages of companionship. There’s no mention, for instance, of Billi missing out on important years of child-birthing, instead, there’s just the promise that when Billi is ready, her grandmother will throw her an even grander wedding.
For all the effort that the characters spend trying to force Billi to choose between China and the US, the film seems, like Billi, to embrace the best qualities in both cultures: the gut-wrenching generosity of a little local church in New York, the food, language, and family ties of China. “They’re different,” Billi insists when her bellhop forcefully tries to persuade her of America’s supremacy, as Billi herself wrestles with the recent disappointment of her rejected fellowship alongside the deteriorating health of her grandmother on her first night back in China. The dinner where Billi’s parents are pitted against relatives, who consider themselves “the Good children” or “the children who stayed,” is an exercise in a new kind of rhetoric when talking about Sino-American culture and the permeable borders between the two countries.
Even the criticism of China takes on a different form than in other films–it’s cannier, subtle, and biting. We have the image of a woman in the corset while all the other men in the room are gambling. The line with all its favoritism and unfairness bundled into a single breath–“We would like the same room”–pins down the injustice at the core of the Chinese experience. At a time when Chinese production houses have more and more influence on the stories being told and more directors of color, especially Chinese directors, are being given the ability tell their stories, it’s important that we have ways to critique and celebrate objectively without being pious. The Farewell does this.
One last important point: Ellen the dog doesn’t figure as prominently in the movie as the trailer leads you to believe, so you need to be prepared for that disappointed. It’s one of the few disappointments of The Farewell.
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