Variety's Review Of "The Farewell"

Monday, January 28, 2019

From Variety on the recently picked up film "The Farewell":

Lulu Wang’s “The Farewell” begins with the words “Based on an actual lie,” which is a pretty funny way to present a true story about how the Chinese-American filmmaker’s family decided to spare their grandmother a terminal diagnosis. They don’t want to spoil the limited time she has left, and so they conspire to carry on as if everything’s normal — except that each of them is saddened by the news, and so they engineer a plan to throw a fake wedding celebration for one of her grandsons in China, allowing everyone to say their goodbyes together. And so, what began as a small lie — “a good lie,” in the doctor’s words — snowballs into a much more elaborate deception [...]

But “The Farewell” doesn’t aim for the kind of big laughs a film such as “The Big Sick” strives to inspire, not does it lean quite so heavily into its more tearjerky elements. Frankly, there are a hundred ways that Wang could have spun this into a more broadly appealing mainstream comedy, and yet she prefers to play it closer in tone to an independent drama like Ang Lee’s “The Wedding Banquet” — which also involved staging a fake nuptial feast in order to keep relatives in the dark, albeit for far different reasons.

I'll definitely have to check this out when I can as I hear it got a standing ovation and stars some great people in it including Awkwafina, Tzi Ma, Diana Lin.