‘The Farewell’ Isn’t The Chinese Version of ‘My Big Fat Greek Wedding’ — It’s A Horror Movie

When my uncle died, the family decided not to tell my grandmother —his mother— for fear it would upset her in her advanced age and failing health. It was a decision made by the eldest brothers and imposed upon the rest of the family, even the American-born generation that found the idea abhorrent to the point of cruel. My grandmother died two years later thinking that this son had just decided at some point to stop talking to her when she needed her family around her most. It devastated a few of my cousins who were close to my grandmother. I’m sure it devastated more, but they’re not talking. It was all done for her own good, you see? Except there’s a certain element of the Chinese persona that values a little martyrdom the better to prove their superior fidelity to family. Lulu Wang’s The Farewell is personal. Widely represented as a quirky cultural comedy with much made of Zhao Schuzen’s Nai Nai character as some adorable imp, it is in fact, the story of a very familiar monster for many first-generation Chinese here in the States. I’m not saying it’s not good — it’s actually very good — I’m saying it’s not good because it’s some kind of My Big Fat Greek Wedding farce about the foibles of a cute, patronizable ethnicity. It’s good because it’s a horror movie.

In it, a woman who’s lived most of her life in New York, Billi (Awkwafina), learns her beloved grandmother (“Nai Nai” just means “grandmother on the father’s side”) has terminal lung cancer and not long to live. This galvanizes her sons, now living in Japan and America, to return to China under the guise of throwing a large wedding banquet for a hopeless cousin Hao Hao (Chen Han) and his Japanese “bride” Aiko (Aio Mizuhara). The plan is not to tell Nai Nai her own diagnosis, but to gather around her one last time in celebration of her life. The devil being in the details, what resonated with me most about The Farewell were scenes where Billi’s mom (Diana Lin) is casually cruel to her. She belittles Billi for being able to show her emotions when, we infer, she herself can not; and she likes to make jokes about how Billi is a failure, a bad investment, an irresponsible narcissist bent on bringing dishonor on their family. What she is, is the product of a brutal cultural dynamic where she’s set against her mother-in-law, her sisters-in-law, even her daughter in some perverse game of achievements academic and economic. The exhausted hostility of her first interaction with Nai Nai is the kind of burned-in exchange I remember from almost every familial exchange I witnessed as a child. It’s brutal and The Farewell nails it.

Even the quick, awkward conversation Billi has with her hotel’s porter rings with those uncomfortable undertones of competition and suggestion. When he urges Billi to choose which is better between America and China, it’s not playful or innocent curiosity, but a microcosm of the way the culture is built around outward signs of wealth at war, eternally, with a truly toxic nationalism. The restaurant dinner sequence where the grown siblings spar about the relative merits of a Chinese versus American education, the way her uncle (Jiang Yongbo) speaks to her as though she were a very slow child, how Billi is constantly apologizing for her Chinese, all of serves to underscore exactly why it is I had an acrimonious divorce from my parents at a very young age. All I see when I watch The Farewell is pain. It’s the pain of how my parents were conditioned to reach me, and how I was, in turn, born into an American culture that is constitutionally incompatible with them.

Americans have been programmed to see Asian culture as an exotic monolith as inscrutable as it is entertaining. But there are dozens of distinct Asian cultures, most of them unfriendly towards one another after centuries of grievances, yet all of them united under a racial dislike of Americans. Legendary Fifth Generation filmmaker Zhang Yimou’s Great Wall was pilloried by allies in the United States for casting Matt Damon as some sort of savior figure in the picture, yet if you actually watch the film you’d find the Chinese think Damon’s character is an animal who smells bad, not to mention rude and comically-stupid. And the end of the film, once the Chinese have finished using Damon for whatever Damon can provide, they release him back into the wilderness. It is, to me, one of the most accurate English-language films to ever describe the conversations had around the dinner tables of my childhood.

The Farewell gets this. The cosmic irony of the broad acceptance of Wang’s film here by a mainstream American audience is that the “benign” racism of that audience has blinded them to the harsh truths detailed by The Farewell. The key is Little Nai Nai (Hong Lu), Nai Nai’s sister who makes the decision to lie to Nai Nai and reveals she’s living apart from her husband the better to take care of her sister. She yearns for a reunion after Nai Nai dies but until then, she perceives it to be her duty to be by her sister’s side. The Chinese would applaud her selflessness in giving up her last few years with her husband in this pursuit. That’s just one of the ways the Chinese are different from me.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is due in 2020. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.

Where to stream The Farewell