"The Farewell" sustains a mood, tone and strategy of clean lines, orderly framing and emotional containment. But that doesn't mean writer-director Lulu Wang's second feature lacks what you might call the movie stuff: the stuff of laughs, tears and, even if your family is a different sort of family entirely, the power of narrative persuasion.
While Wang may stint occasionally on the sort of character detail separating a very good film from a great one, "The Farewell" takes you to a humanely eccentric place. And crucially, Wang and company found all the right actors to populate a semi-autobiographical tale of familial deception.
"The Farewell" grew out of a 2016 episode of "This American Life." As retold here, the story is "based on an actual lie," as the opening title card assures us. In the northern Chinese city of Changchun, the MRI confirms what an X-ray indicated: a Stage 4 cancer diagnosis. She is Nai Nai (Mandarin for "grandma"), whose granddaughter, Billi, is struggling as a writer in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, N.Y.
The falsehoods criss-cross the world in the movie's opening cellphone exchange between Nai Nai, portrayed by Zhao Shuzhen, and Billi, the leading role played by "Crazy Rich Asians" and "Ocean's 8" ringer Awkwafina. Billi asks about the hospital waiting room sounds in the background. What's wrong? Oh, nothing, says Nai Nai; I'm over at my sister's. Then Billi fudges the truth about something, and so on. Wang shrewdly tucks her thesis statement into some basic exposition.
Raised in the U.S., Billi's parents (Tzi Ma and Diana Lin) learn the truth about Nai Nai, which Nai Nai herself doesn't know. She is dying, and the extended family, in America and China, must gather to be by her side, even if she doesn't know why.
The ruse is set into motion. Nai Nai's sister (Lu Hong, related to filmmaker Wang) will tell Nai Nai the X-rays showed only "benign shadows," nothing alarming, never mind that nagging cough. A wedding comes into play. Billi's rather dim cousin (Han Chen) will pretend to marry his Japanese girlfriend (Aoi Mizuhara), thus providing the excuse for a family reunion while there's still time. (Even with two viewings, I wasn't entirely sure if the wedding was a ruse or simply rushed into go-mode for Nai Nai's sake. Then again, narrative questions like that have always eluded me, whatever a film's language or setting.)
Two months behind on the rent, steeped in well-behaved melancholy, Billi travels home to Changchun. There she's surrounded by family members entirely willing to "carry the emotional burden" for grandmother, in the words of her uncle. To Billi this seems not simply contrived but dishonest. As the film glides toward the wedding, "The Farewell" glances on matters of Chinese fealty versus American independence, and the lengths to which we may protect our loved ones from the truth, if we deem that truth inconvenient.
Billi's the central figure but a recessive and potentially static one. Awkwafina, fortunately, captivates without a speck of external effort; she's interesting and emotionally true when doing virtually nothing but observing and processing. "The Farewell" has its funny bits, with Chen's somewhat dazed groom a standout. In fact Wang's narrative could've been turned into a far broader and more obvious culture-clash comedy, along the commercial lines of "Crazy Rich Asians" (Wang's project was well underway prior to its release) or, earlier, "My Big Fat Greek Wedding." "My Chinese Cousin's Modestly Scaled Wedding, Designed to Precede My Grandmother's Funeral" doesn't have the same ring, but you get the idea.
Wang is working very different territory, however. Scenes such as the taxicab encounter between Billi and her mother carry a strong emotional charge, all the more effective for their determined lack of movie-style catharsis (Prime detail: mother cannot make eye contact with daughter, even though daughter is craving it.) If Wang hadn't kept the lid on things in "The Farewell," its sneak-attack ending might've seemed like a phony. As is, it's an earned payoff that has the added benefit of being true.
The film packs its frames tightly, thanks to cinematographer Anna Franquesa Solano's love of telephoto lensing, adding a natural sense of depth and life. Throughout the film, we watch Nai Nai, and the splendid actress Shuzhen, for signs that she knows what's really going on. Meantime Awkwafina's Billi, her shoulders in a defensive crouch, watches everyone else watching Nai Nai, and wonders if she can keep up the charade.
I wish the performers had more moments to explore at greater length. On the other hand, the length of the film itself feels about right. There's no disguising the extended-anecdote nature of "The Farewell." There's also no hiding how well Wang has managed the retelling of her own family's story.
