`The Farewell'
PG 1:40 ★★★★
Little white lies permeate “The Farewell,” in which Awkwafina delivers a breakout dramatic performance as a young woman caught up in a geographic, cultural and ethical tug-of-war.
Billi, Awkwafina's 30-something character, lives in New York and is trying to make it as a writer; she frequently talks on the phone with her grandmother in China — whom she calls Nai Nai — for moral support and to touch base with the country of her birth. As “The Farewell” opens, Billi and Nai Nai chat easily, peppering their conversation with the evasions, feints and dodges everyone uses to smooth the conversational path, Billi fibbing about bumping into an old friend, Nai Nai insisting she's at home when she's actually in a hospital waiting room.
Neither wants the other one to worry, which is the prime motivating force in “The Farewell,” written and directed by Lulu Wang. Wang, who related the story on the radio program “This American Life,” has based the film on “an actual lie,” when her real-life Nai Nai was diagnosed with stage-four lung cancer and the family rallied around — not to support her, but to deceive her, telling her she was in perfect health and fast-tracking a grandchild's wedding so that they would have one last happy gathering.
Perhaps because she's so intimately familiar with the paradoxes at play, Wang balances the alternately madcap and melancholy contours of “The Farewell” with admirable assurance, channeling her own obvious ambivalence through Billi's sometimes affecting, often hilarious mixed feelings.
“The Farewell” pays delightful, insightful homage to the facades and pretenses nearly everyone adopts in the name of compassion. Not incidentally, at a time when many call for American citizens to “go back where they came from,” Wang and her film offer a perfectly eloquent, elegantly pluralistic retort. When each of us contains multitudes, “The Farewell” suggests, home is everywhere, or anywhere we happen to be.