The Farewell (2019)

What do we owe to others and what do we owe to ourselves? When we tell the truth, do we tell it because we’re looking out for another’s best interest or for our own?

In simple terms, The Farewell is concerned about a lie that a family tells its matriarch: she is dying of cancer but they pass it off to her as a poor recovery from a cold. Looking beyond that plot mechanism, the film examines the intersection of personality and culture, and how much influence one exerts on the other. Billi (Awkwafina) illustrates this interchange via the tense relationships she has with the locations she inhabits – she is at home in neither America nor China. She can appear to fit in within both cultures, knowing their respective languages and most of the cultural norms, but she feels like an outsider. This status is only exacerbated by her search for a satisfactory answer to the dilemma posed by her grandmother’s illness: to tell her or not to tell her. Billi wants to tell her grandmother the truth, but her family asserts that she only wants to do that to push the weight of that truth off herself and onto her grandmother who, they argue, should be relaxing in her final days instead of worrying about dying. Billi resolves to keep the secret and struggles to not let her emotions show, something that the entire family struggles with throughout the film.

The Farewell features wonderful performances, especially by Shuzhen Zhao as Billi’s grandmother (Nai Nai), and provokes genuine thought about the nature of secrets and why we keep or tell them. Is it a more noble act to tell the truth and deal with the consequences together, or to keep that truth secret if it ultimately protects someone? There is no definitive answer to such a question but I appreciate Lulu Wang’s work here because it allowed me a space to consider each side and to empathize with its characters, in addition to the film’s clever observations about the funny idiosyncrasies that are uniqe to every family but universal in their depth of feeling.