The Farewell is a pleasant little film that you could take your mother to see, warm and in places, funny. Zhao Shuzhen and Awkwafina are fine actors. And it's not - for a change - about a comic action hero. But I would advise my fellow filmgoers to go with modest expectations, or risk disappointment. Film critics have fawned all over this film that just can't carry the weight of all that praise.
The supposed insights about the 'immigrant experience' would be familiar to any Air Force brat or for that matter anyone in North America who has been transferred or had to leave home to seek work. Homesickness, nostalgia for the way one's home town used to look like, grief over relatives whose funerals one may have been unable to attend, these are great themes to explore, but only if the filmmaker hadn't tried to insist that these are experiences specific to immigrants at all let alone Chinese immigrants.
Most unfortunately, the lie theme doesn't get explored beyond our being told that it is a good lie because it removes the emotional burden of dying from the patient. Awkwafina's character objects but never seriously challenges her family, say by asking them how stupid do they think Grandma is, that this lie won't succeed without Grandma's tacit collaboration? In which case, what is the point? There will be no sweet oblivion.
None of the characters asks or considers the question of who is best able to manage, not just bear, the burden of this 'Tree of Knowledge'. If Grandma is indeed about to enter palliative care, who can best direct that burden, a loving family or the patient themselves? Instead, one of the characters offers up the same cultural relativism chestnut, delivered in tones of such maddening condescension I wanted to throw my popcorn at the screen.
The not so compelling lie theme dispensed with, the film dissolves into a pile of irrelevance. Grandma is at least 15 years too young to be even a teenager during the Chinese civil war, but talks about it as if she were a veteran anyway. Wedding arranged for the pretext of bringing the family together to bid farewell involves a bride who is Japanese and the groom, Chinese. Given the long history of often bumpy relations between Japan and China, I doubt that the bride's ethnicity was chosen by accident, but it is one theme too many, it looked like it was thrown in just to try and make this film look more steak than souffle.
I left glad I'd paid $7 (Tuesday discount at my local theatre) to see it - no less, but no more.
The supposed insights about the 'immigrant experience' would be familiar to any Air Force brat or for that matter anyone in North America who has been transferred or had to leave home to seek work. Homesickness, nostalgia for the way one's home town used to look like, grief over relatives whose funerals one may have been unable to attend, these are great themes to explore, but only if the filmmaker hadn't tried to insist that these are experiences specific to immigrants at all let alone Chinese immigrants.
Most unfortunately, the lie theme doesn't get explored beyond our being told that it is a good lie because it removes the emotional burden of dying from the patient. Awkwafina's character objects but never seriously challenges her family, say by asking them how stupid do they think Grandma is, that this lie won't succeed without Grandma's tacit collaboration? In which case, what is the point? There will be no sweet oblivion.
None of the characters asks or considers the question of who is best able to manage, not just bear, the burden of this 'Tree of Knowledge'. If Grandma is indeed about to enter palliative care, who can best direct that burden, a loving family or the patient themselves? Instead, one of the characters offers up the same cultural relativism chestnut, delivered in tones of such maddening condescension I wanted to throw my popcorn at the screen.
The not so compelling lie theme dispensed with, the film dissolves into a pile of irrelevance. Grandma is at least 15 years too young to be even a teenager during the Chinese civil war, but talks about it as if she were a veteran anyway. Wedding arranged for the pretext of bringing the family together to bid farewell involves a bride who is Japanese and the groom, Chinese. Given the long history of often bumpy relations between Japan and China, I doubt that the bride's ethnicity was chosen by accident, but it is one theme too many, it looked like it was thrown in just to try and make this film look more steak than souffle.
I left glad I'd paid $7 (Tuesday discount at my local theatre) to see it - no less, but no more.