Film Comment – July 01, 2019

The Farewell

BY SORAYA NADIA MCDONALD

Director: Lulu Wang

Country/Distributor:USA, A24

Opening:July 12

S

ecrets are a lot like psycholog-

ical versions of Chekhov’s guns.

Stories that introduce them are really

building up to the moment when they’re

inevitably revealed. But writer/director

Lulu Wang subverts that dictum with her

second feature, The Farewell, a film “based

on an actual lie,” which Wang shared in a

piece for NPR’s This American Lifein 2016.

In The Farewell, rapper and actress

Awkwafina plays Billi, a young writer living

in New York. She and her parents moved to

the states when Billi was 6. Now she’s an

adult and her paternal grandmother, Nai

Nai, has been diagnosed with stage-four

lung cancer. Much to Billi’s horror, no one

in her family plans to inform Nai Nai of

this fatal development. Her Chinese doctors

have followed tradition: they tell Nai Nai’s

younger sister the truth, then leave it to her

to explain to her sister that her persistent

cough and irregular X-rays are the result of

“benign shadows” on her lungs. “It’s not

the cancer that kills you,” Billi’s mother,

Jian (Diana Lin), explains. “It’s the fear.”

And so Billi’s extended family has

decided to organize a quickie wedding in

China for Billi’s cousin, Hao Hao, who has

been dating his apparent fiancée for three

months. The wedding will give the entire

family an opportunity to say goodbye to

Nai Nai without subjecting her to the

grief of knowing she is terminally ill.

What ensues is a study in coping with

grief and familial obligation, and how

those obligations strain even those who

are committed to upholding them.

The younger generation balks at

secret-keeping. When Billi arrives in

China for Hao Hao’s wedding, the two of

them share a shell-shocked half-presence

while the grownups around them try to

behave normally. Billi’s father, Haiyan

(Tzi Ma); Hao Hao (Chen Hanwei); and

his father, Haibin (Jiang Yongbo) cope

by drinking heavily. The women busy

themselves with domestic industriousness:

cooking, cleaning, and monitoring male

alcohol consumption.

Wang’s shots (with DP Anna Franquesa

Solano) frame the family and the story

with static sobriety until deep into the

third act’s wedding reception. The family

is seated at a round banquet table playing

a drinking game. Poor Hao Hao struggles

to keep up, and as the room begins to spin

for him, so does the camera. Until then,

Alex Weston’s bright classical score adds

a sense of grandness to an otherwise

diminutive, if touching, story.

Mostly, Wang focuses on Billi as she

tries to reconcile a show of love that

requires lying by omission. Secret-keeping

actually functions like a gentlemen’s agree-

ment: the keeper tries not to divulge

information, and loved ones perform the

requisite obliviousness that allows the lie

July-August 2019| FILMCOMMENT| 71

The slump of Awkafina’s shoulders in The Farewellreflects how journeys home turn us into children again, and the

way the presence of elders makes us shrink into being cared for, no matter how long it’s been since we’ve seen them.

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SHORT TAKE

THE MOUNTAIN

Director:

Rick Alverson

Country/Distributor:

USA, Kino Lorber

Opening:July 26

In the 1950s-set road

movie The Moun-

tain, Rick Alverson,

whose films anato-

mize American spiri-

tual malaise, uses

that most frontal of

metaphors: the

lobotomy. Tye Sheri-

dan, Ready Player

One’s gamer boy,

here plays the differ-

ently zombified

Andy. His mother

institutionalized,

Andy moves in a

fugue state, sharpen-

ing skates and dri-

ving the Zamboni at

the local ice rink,

snowed under with

Freudian dreams.

A father figure

emerges: Dr. Wallace

Fiennes (Jeff Gold-

blum), the surgeon

who performed a

transorbital lobot-

omy on Andy’s

mother. With a

dazed flicker of guilt,

“Wally” takes Andy

on as his factotum as

he crisscrosses chilly

landscapes like a

traveling salesman,

his miracle-cure tools

a long pick and

dainty silver hammer.

The Mountainis

set in a pre–Space

Age ’50s, all colors

fading into the wood

panels of a restau-

rant, or the white-

washed walls of an

asylum. Quirky stag-

ings freeze into near-

tableaux; surfaces

remain opaque,

depths unfathomed.

Aside from the

refrain of TV’s Perry

Como singing

“Home on the

Range,” Alverson

works not through

stabs of irony but

with a forbiddingly

deliberate pace and

straitened actors—a

lobotomized style,

which further restricts

Sheridan’s recessive

indie-protagonist

role to a few dull

shades of the same

sullen expression.

Everyone seems

exhausted, but Gold-

blum summons a

ghost of his caressing

wit, wielding it as an

instrument of control.

And cinema’s most

sui generis physical

presence, Denis

Lavant, is a mar-

velously gestural

sloppy drunk and

“Radiant Seeker”—

another of Alverson’s

total individuals, adrift

and unreconciled.

—Mark Asch