In The Farewell (2019), the main character's cousin has a wedding as an excuse for the whole family to get back together in China.
Was it a real wedding (as in a legal marriage) or was it just an elaborate setup for the grandmother's sake?
asked Sep 8, 2019 at 21:54
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1 Answer
Short answer: the wedding was real.
The story that was the basis for the movie was a real-life situation faced by This American Life contributor Lulu Wang. In the original story, I got the impression the family was coming together for a banquet, not the wedding itself.
My family built on that lie with an even more elaborate one. We realized we had a problem. How are we all going to manage to see Nai Nai before she died? Family from three countries needed to say goodbye without letting Nai Nai know we were actually saying goodbye. This would require more than Wite-Out. My dad had an idea.
Lulu's Dad: So I said, all right, your uncle, maybe we can just, you know, stage your son's wedding early, one year early.
Lulu Wang: Are you proud that you came up with this idea?
Lulu's Dad: Well, you know, I'm the-- everybody considered me as the smartest in the family. So I mean, it's a show. I mean--
Lulu Wang: This was our plan-- a giant goodbye party disguised as a giant wedding banquet.
Lulu's Dad: This is the lie that everybody agreed to lie.
Lulu Wang: And here's how it was going to go down. My Uncle Hai Bin's son, Liang-Liang, had recently married a Japanese woman. They planned to celebrate in China the next year, but now it would be in two weeks, and it would bring together family members who had not all been in the same place for 25 years.
So, working off that original story, it sounded to me like it was common knowledge that the two were already married.
However, in this correction posted on a review of The Farewell in The New York Times, I found out otherwise:
Correction: July 15, 2019 An earlier version of this review misstated the nature of the wedding depicted in the movie. The marriage was real; it was not pretend.
