THE LONG GOODBYE
“The Farewell” is the perfect antidote to the summer-movie blues. Small in scale but big in heart, the story of a wedding held under trying circumstances might not be the type of film that go can toe to toe with “Spider-Man: Far From Home” when it comes to total box-office bucks, but its very downto-earth, relatable story proves to be its superpower.
Directed and written by Lulu Wang, who based it on an incident that happened in her family and initially recounted it for the “This American Life” radio series, “The Farewell” is a movie anyone can find a common bond with, even if the specific circumstances here are foreign. On top of that, it makes a star of Awkwafina (real name Nora Lum) who stole the show in her supporting role in “Crazy Rich Asians” but here proves she can carry an entire film.
Awkwafina is Billi, a young Chinese-American woman struggling to make it as an artist in New York. Her father, Haiyan (Tzi Ma), and mother, Jian (Diana Lin), obviously want her to be happy but also wish she had a profession that was less financially precarious.
But Billi’s paycheck-to-paycheck woes suddenly take a back seat when her parents get word that her beloved grandmother, Nai Nai (Shuzhen Zhao), who lives in China, has been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. The twist here is that Nai Nai does not know the bad news, even though the rest of the family does. The thinking is that the burden of impending death will be carried on the shoulders of those who love Nai Nai, not on Nai Nai herself.
So the only way everyone in the far-flung family can have an excuse to see her one last time without arousing suspicion is to stage some other, happier, life-changing event: the wedding of Billi’s cousin, Haohao (Han Chen), to his Japanese fianceé, Aiko (Aoi Mizuhara).
Billi, being more American in orientation than Chinese, is horrified by this turn of events. No doubt, like many of her fellow Americans, she thinks Nai Nai deserves the truth.
Because they don’t think Billi can keep such a secret, her parents leave her in New York. But, to their initial horror, she shows up in China anyway. (Dad also worries whether she can afford it. He asks if she put the trip on her credit card.)
This is where “The Farewell,” as it plumbs the daily life of an ordinary Chinese family as seen through the eyes of a woman whose Mandarin isn’t great and doesn’t appreciate all the subtleties of Chinese culture, becomes sweetly moving. Ultimately, family is family, no matter what language the members speak.
Considering its premise, “The Farewell” could have been mawkish, but Wang walks the fine line between humor and heartbreak without a misstep. There are moments that are very funny but the film never threatens to become a broad comedy like “Crazy Rich Asians,” which revolved around a much more extravagant Chinese wedding in Singapore.
Yet “The Farewell” feels more grounded in real life than the fantastic excesses of “CRA.” Shot in the northeastern Chinese city of Changchun, “The Farewell” is set far from the swanky stylishness of Shanghai and the industrial hubbub of Guangzhou that dominate images of contemporary China in the West.
But “The Farewell” and “Crazy Rich Asians” do share one thing: The latter proved that large swaths of American moviegoers would see a Hollywood movie with an allAsian cast while the former, which has already opened in several North American markets, is proving the point again by appealing to a large crossover audience. It’s one of the few indie-movie success stories of this summer. (And, another, “Yesterday,” features a South Asian lead.)
More important than demographics though, is that “The Farewell” — a PG-rated film with appeal to both adults and older kids — is a human story, and it’s encouraging to know that humanity still can have broad box-office appeal. Not all heroes wear capes, indeed.