The Farewell review: modest, affecting family drama says goodbye to subtlety

Dir: Lulu Wang. Cast: Awkwafina, Tzi Ma, Diana Lin, Jim Liu, Shuzhen Zhou, Gil Perez-Abraham, Hong Lu. PG cert, 100 mins

The Farewell, a US sleeper hit less delicate than it looks, starts in a Chinese hospital, after quietly announcing by caption that it’s “based on an actual lie”. The camera lingers on a giant painting of a lake, serene and surrounded by flowers, while an old lady called Nai Nai (Shuzhen Zhou) – a standard Mandarin name for one's paternal grandma – puts through a call to her granddaughter Billi (Awkwafina) in New York City.

Everything, Nai Nai claims, is just fine. But the conversation, believably done, consists of white lies on either side, ranging from tiny to major. Is Billi keeping warm, wearing a hat? She isn’t, but says she is. Nai Nai, meanwhile, doesn’t fess up to where she is or why. X-rays have shown spots on her lungs that turn out to be Stage IV cancer, but she doesn’t relay any hint of this, and nor is she even fully up to speed.

Her sister (Hong Lu, a real-life great-auntie playing herself) has given her a line about “benign shadows”, keeping Nai Nai in the dark. She is ushered directly home, while the family collectively decide what to do.

The film’s writer-director, Lulu Wang, based this script on a conspiracy in her own family to shield their Nai Nai from the awful truth, when she was given just months to live. In many countries, it wouldn’t be legal for the medical establishment to let such a deception happen, but not in China, where humane custom and/or superstition often means the terminally ill party is the very last to know.

A wedding banquet is hastily arranged for one of Billi’s cousins, essentially to serve as a ceremonial send-off that Nai Nai can enjoy without even being aware it’s for her. Billi, while shocked at being sworn to secrecy, naturally wants to come, but she’s so upfront about her emotions that her parents – especially her mother (Diana Lin) – think it would be too risky to fly her over.

Plucking up the courage, she makes her own way, and the stage is set for a bittersweet face-off between familial attitudes – the consoling lie of an older generation, easing Nai Nai’s path to the grave with the minimum of distress, versus the painful truth, which could cost her some equanimity but allow chances to say goodbye.

Few families manage without a good lie here and there – we postpone bad news until an appropriate time, or minimise the impact, sometimes until it’s too late. But the public face of The Farewell’s lie is overwhelming – literally everyone but Nai Nai knows she’s dying. Regardless of their spectrum of feelings on the matter, the family aim to present a united front, but in the scheme of the film, every actor is having to work overtime to signal inner conflict. In feature-length form, it pans out just like the poster – an anxious group photograph centred on a single, elderly smiling face.

Wang’s direction is a bit relentless in this regard. There’s no way we could miss the stifled sadness behind Nai Nai’s back in every scene of staged merriment – even before a strangely rock ’n’ roll flourish where the clan stride down a street in slo-mo phalanx formation, looking equally pained.

Nai Nai, presented as an emotionally intelligent matriarch who doesn’t miss a trick, gets to raise an eyebrow at how miserable Billi looks when she turns up. So the patient can’t be oblivious, surely, to how oddly all her other close relatives are behaving on a daily basis.

Except, perhaps, she can? You wait for the film to confront the clear possibility that Nai Nai must know exactly what’s going on – a clue, somewhere, that she has privately decided to play along with the charade. But this can’t be signalled unambiguously, because Wang would then be stuck with a contradictory ending: the lie, in the end, pans out to be exactly what the doctor ordered.

Awkwafina, a secret weapon in Ocean’s 8 and Crazy Rich Asians, has been called a revelation in this role, but instead remains poised on the brink: neither Wang’s script nor direction are subtle enough to give her more than a nudging dramatic showcase. Meanwhile, as the family fret over further hospital visits, the camera locks in on that lake painting again, a visual prompt for the idea of looking on the bright side – insisting on it at all costs, even, rather than dwelling on morbid probabilities when it comes to poor health.

As a metaphor, it’s hardly any more obvious than the film at large. Wang’s family story is modestly affecting and deserves an audience, but if it does prompt thoughts about weighing up the importance of emotional truth, they mainly come afterwards. While we watch, it keeps working on a single layer when there were definitely more to be discovered – and laying it on quite thick.

Subscriber reward: Click here to save up to 40% on tickets at more than 250 cinemas across the UK