Jean-Paul’s rating: 5/5 stars

Bottom Line: Touching and awkward and loving and uncomfortable. Just like a family.

“The Farewell” is an interesting movie on many levels. It is a movie about family and about culture and about morality. It is billed as a dramatic comedy, but it is funny not in the joke sense but in the way all families are funny, very awkwardly. It is painful at times as the silences stretch as family members decide what to say next, if anything. All this makes “The Farewell” a strange movie.

The coolest aspect of “The Farewell” is the East meets West factor. The movie is about a Chinese family whose grandmother Nai Nai (Shuzhen Zhou) in China is dying of lung cancer. The family is spread across the world and they all return to China to see her under the guise of a family wedding. In Chinese culture, it is common to not tell a loved one that they have been diagnosed with life ending disease and Nai Nai is not told she has terminal lung cancer. The family has many discussions on whether that is the right thing to do. There are also discussions about what it’s like to be Chinese in the United States. Billi (Awkwafina), who is from New York, gets asked multiple times about the United States, sometimes by strangers, always to humorous results.

It is a very interesting moral question, whether to tell someone they are dying. One of the family members explains it as the family taking on the collective emotional burden of death from the dying. We, with our Western individualist philosophy may instant balk at the idea of not being told we are dying, but I can understand the appeal, being able to live what remains of your life without the Damocles Sword of Death hanging over you at all times. The individualist counter-argument is that there are so many things one might want to do with that knowledge in hand and that one would not be able to do without that knowledge. The collectivist retort would be that one would already have done what is expected and there is only the need to continue what is expected. The individualist would complain that they didn’t get the chance to do any of that because they were too busy working 40 hours a week for the last 40 years with the belief that there was always plenty of time for those things later, always later. Or something like that. I may be a little rusty in my individualist vs. collectivist philosophy.

I will admit that I am a sucker for well written movies whose premise is an interesting moral question and that “The Farewell” is firmly in that wheelhouse so maybe I liked this movie more than most people would. Even saying that, though, the views into how family life is pretty much universally family life despite the culture it came from are poignant and endearing and I believe would appeal to all. There is also a lot about Chinese culture to be gleaned from the movie as well. And oh yeah, Awkwafina is wonderful. She just has this delightfully awkward attitude that makes her perfect for bridging the gap between East and West. I seriously wonder if the Awkwa in Awkwafina came from her awkward attitude.