Lies we tell the terminally ill

If that subject sounds like some kind of poor taste joke, it’s not. It’s actually one of the main themes of the last two movies I’ve seen, one for the first time, one a film I loved from three years ago that I watched again.

It won’t surprise you to know that one of these movies is Lulu Wang’s The Farewell, where “lies we tell the terminally ill” is basically the film’s premise. Awkwafina plays a Chinese-American woman named Billi, who returns to China to say goodbye to her grandmother, Nai Nai, after the latter has been recently diagnosed with terminal cancer. Only, Nai Nai doesn’t know that. You probably couldn’t hide a medical diagnosis from the person being diagnosed in America, but in China, you can – as this is based on a true story. The family organizes a hasty wedding for Billi’s cousin, who has only been dating his girlfriend for three months, to support the lie. This will give everyone a chance to say goodbye to her, even as she has no idea why everyone looks so sad and cries extra hard when they leave.

It doesn’t really work. I mean, Nai Nai never learns that she’s terminal, so it works in that sense. But celebrating her life doesn’t really work when they are understandably finding it so difficult to put on a happy face, and she doesn’t realize she’s supposed to savor every moment, so she just wonders why everyone looks so tired. Lovely effort, though, in the sense that it’s meant to be an act of humanistic kindness to her and prevent her from dying prematurely of her cancer diagnosis. (The Chinese believe that it’s not the cancer itself that kills a person, or at least not as quickly as the awareness of the diagnosis and the fear of death.) The ideal way to do it, I suppose, would be if only a chosen few members of the family knew about it, and the rest were told to make every effort to come to this wedding for “a reason we can’t tell you about, but it’s very important.” I suppose that wouldn’t really work either.

The other film is Chris Kelly’s Other People, which came out in 2016, and was my #7 movie of that year. This deals with the final year in the life of terminal cancer patient Joanne (Molly Shannon), as seen through the eyes of her son, David (Jesse Plemons), who returns to Sacramento from his life in New York in order to spend her remaining time with her. The cancer is not the thing that’s a mystery to Joanne, as it wouldn’t be for nearly anyone who has regular doctor’s appointments in a western country. The lies David tells her has to do with how he’s doing, not how she’s doing, but for a similar reason. He doesn’t want to upset Joanne any more than she needs to be upset when she’s already facing her mortality, and wants her to die not worrying about him. So he doesn’t tell her he and his long-time boyfriend have broken up, or that his career is facing a dead end after his comedy pilot didn’t get picked up. The setup is based on Kelly’s own mother’s death in 2009.

What I find so moving about the humanism of Other People is the lengths David goes to in order to give this last gift to his mother. Or I should say, the lengths his ex-boyfriend goes to. Joanne and the rest of the family come to New York to see David perform in his improv troupe, and afterwards, they stroll back to the apartment that David shares … well, used to share with Paul, his ex (Zach Woods). To support the lie, Paul is there, smiling and welcoming them in, pretending to know where everything is even though he doesn’t live there anymore. I guess I find it moving that Paul would do this for a guy with whom he had a complicated relationship that has now ended. It’s not for David, but for Joanne. David’s realization near the end that Joanne may not need to have this hidden from her is one of the parts where I really tear up.

I loved both films, though I feel like I need to see The Farewell again, as my own last lingering bits of jet lag, combined with the fact that much of the dialogue is in Chinese, made it difficult for me to stay fully awake for the whole film. I feel like some essential bit of the payoff of The Farewell slipped through my fingers. I was also tired when I started watching Other People on Tuesday night, but maybe that’s the difference between a movie you’ve never seen and a movie you know you love. My eyes only started to close in Other People during that final moving scene, oddly enough, though maybe that’s because Joanne could barely keep her eyes open either. The amazing thing about Kelly’s film is it allows us to experience Joanne’s death from both perspectives, hers and her son’s – the sign of an astute filmmaker, an astute observer of other people, indeed.