Movie Review: Sundance smash “The Big Sick” is a rom-com done right.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Charming, immature boy meets beautiful, unavailable girl. Boy goes out on date with girl. Girl falls into bed with boy. Cue adorable, time-is-passing romantic montages.
Then, Girl suddenly develops mysterious illness. Boy puts his comedy career on hold. Boy is thrust into an awkward relationship with Girl’s desperately worried parents. Boy is — wait, you haven’t heard this one before?
What’s marvelous about “The Big Sick,” a sweet, unassuming new comedy written by Kumail Nanjiani and his real-life partner Emily V. Gordon, produced by comedy hitmaker Judd Apatow, and directed by Michael Showalter, is that it manages to inject a musty genre with invigorating freshness. It feels rather cheap to describe a comedy that hinges its primary dramatic arc on a life-threatening medical condition as feeling like “a new lease on life,” but that’s how warm and winning “The Big Sick” ultimately is. The film was all the rage at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, and it’s the first mega-hit out of Park City in many years (sorry, “Me, Earl & the Dying Girl”) that mostly earns the rapturous praise with which it’s been greeted.
“The Big Sick” is a warm-hearted romance about life-and-death subject matter that also draws from a rich well of comic autobiography. A great deal of what we see transpiring in Showalter’s film — confusion over the Pakistani tradition of arranged marriage, for example, or the main character’s struggling in his burgeoning comedy career whilst driving Ubers to make ends meet — actually happened, giving “The Big Sick” the sting of real, unfiltered life. The film is not without its contrived passages, and like almost all Judd Apatow-produced endeavors, it sags by about twenty minutes. And yet, I was able to overlook “The Big Sick’s” minor flaws because emotions this sincere and unforced are rare in popular cinema, particularly when we have Autobots, growling superheroes and, eh, zombie sharks (“Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales,” anyone?) cluttering up our movie screens.
Kumail Nanjiani is known best to mainstream audiences for his terrific work on the HBO comedy “Silicon Valley,” which just recently wrapped up its solid fourth season by saying farewell to perhaps its most iconic character. Nanjiani’s character on “Silicon Valley” is craven and self-serving, which makes the nebbishy charm that he displays in “The Big Sick” all the more surprising. Of course, the character is still a vaguely Apatovian man-child who recedes in the face of conflict, eats like a 12-year old, and improbably falls into bed with beautiful women. Mr. Nanjiani is also a seasoned standup himself, and our leading man’s confident familiarity with the comedy milieu keeps “The Big Sick” from lapsing into the more self-satisfied passages of something like the Apatow-directed “Funny People”.
Above all, Mr. Nanjiani and Mrs. Gordon has found a superb foil in the form of Ms. Zoe Kazan, who plays Gordon’s fictional surrogate. This is almost certainly the best work of the young actress’s career thus far (particularly considering that her character is bedridden for almost half the movie) and she all but walks away with the movie’s most devastating moments. In her scenes of puppy love with the wonderfully droll Nanjiani, Kazan suggests a painful inner life that more than makes up for a mildly underwritten character. And above all else, her chemistry with her co-star is off the charts, making “The Big Sick” the rarest of all things: a romantic comedy that actually makes you laugh and actually wins your heart. Imagine that.
Kumail Nanjiani’s character in “The Big Sick” is actually named Kumail because hey, when the story is this autobiographical, why change your name to Fred? Kumail spends most of his time trying out new material at various stand-up venues in the greater Chicago area (“9/11 was such a tragedy… we lost nineteen of our best guys” is one of his edgier — and funnier — barbs). One night, his set is interrupted by Emily, a young woman with a terrific smile who’s totally unaware that shouting “woo-hoo” during a comedy set still constitutes heckling. From the moment Nanjiani and Kazan lock eyes, we know they’re destined to end up together: this is one of those movies where the story’s familiar beats are comforting rather than tedious.
Soon, Kumail and Emily are spending every waking moment together. There’s a terrifically insightful scene where Kumail tries to get Emily to watch the Vincent Price-starring cult classic “The Abominable Dr. Phibes,” mostly so he can earn her validation by testing her taste. This seemingly throwaway moment gets to the messy marrow of the modern-day courtship ritual, exploring what kind of impracticalities and personal projections people thrust unto their romantic partners. It is rare to see scenes this observationally astute in a mainstream American comedy, particularly since Mr. Apatow’s sense of quality control has diminished in recent years.
There are also complications with Kumail’s family in regards to his new girlfriend. His parents are strict Muslims, and his mother has an irritating habit of inviting potential Pakistani wives to “drop by” during dinner. No grievance is so unacceptable to Kumail as when one of his mother’s cherry-picked brides-to-be has the gall to tell him that she thinks “The X-Files” isn’t a good show. When Kumail breaks the news to his brother Naveed (BAFTA-winning English-Pakistani actor Adeel Akhtar) that he’s dating a white girl, he shouts the words “white girl” so loud in the ballpark restaurant that a Caucasian family across the way starts staring at them.
This may seem like an idle gag in a movie that’s packed with laughs, but it’s surprising how much of “The Big Sick” is informed by Nanjiani’s perspective as the child of Muslim immigrants. The fact that his character is secretly orchestrating a one-man show about his complicated history with his homeland lets us know that maybe Kumail the character isn’t as apathetic about his parent’s religion as he appears to be.
There’s a nervy intelligence to this movie that’s not dissimilar to Aziz Ansari’s superb Netflix show “Master of None,” another biting observational comedy filtered through a distinctly Muslim-American lens. There are other prescient moments as well, like when Emily’s well-meaning but ineffectual father Terry (a perfectly cast Ray Romano) peppers Kumail with questions about 9/11, or another, more disturbing moment when our protagonist is heckled by a racist frat boy who yells at him to “go back to ISIS”. It’s funny enough to see Emily’s mom — a hell-raising Southern wildflower played with raucous aplomb by Holly Hunter — take a swing at this douchey, xenophobic miscreant, and it’s even funnier to hear the normally deadpan Romano bellow “I got levels, motherfucker!” in an indelible display of small-man rage. And yet, I found it enlivening that a movie as crowd-pleasing as “The Big Sick” takes the time to wrestle with thorny, potentially upsetting issues of race at all, never mind the fact that the movie’s critique is more incisive than it needs to be.
Anyway, back to the plot. About halfway through the movie, Emily is diagnosed with a rare, unclassifiable lung infection: one that’s quickly spreading throughout her body, and one that could possibly kill her. This information pulls the rug out from Kumail’s otherwise rudderless existence — and to make matters more uncomfortable, Emily found out about Kumail’s secret harem of potential wives just before she fell into a coma. It is at this point that “The Big Sick” delves into the kind of emotionally complex territory that you rarely see in films with this kind of bright and shiny veneer.
Kumail, who bides time in hospital waiting rooms and listens to Emily’s voicemails in the heartbreaking hope that she’ll wake up from her slumber, ends up forming a kind of unconventional bond with his girlfriend’s distressed parents. I was astounded by Holly Hunter as Emily’s feisty, no-bullshit mom — she’s an ambassador from a less self-absorbed generation, and the textbook opposite of the Kumail character’s distinctly millennial indifference. It was Mr. Romano, though, who quietly blew me away with his finely observed depiction of middle-aged grief. He handles the movie’s comedy like a master, but his performance practically bursts at the seams with empathy. Between this and his sterling turn in the otherwise problematic HBO drama “Vinyl,” it appears that Romano may be entering a kind of fruitful middle chapter in his career. Perhaps a kind of actorly rebirth is in order? Either way, if you can’t laugh at a bespectacled Romano debating the merits of a hospital cafeteria-made tuna sandwich, then maybe this isn’t the movie for you.
As much as I enjoyed “The Big Sick,” the film is not beyond reproach. Showalter — who is a colleague of David Wain’s, and who made his directorial debut with the affectionate if slightly underbaked Sally Fields-starring indie “Hello, My Name is Doris” — has a bottomless fluency for comedy, but not much visual flair. The movie’s emotional arc is robust, but its look rarely rises above sitcom-adequate. Some of the scenes with Kumail’s comedian pals (played by real-life funny folks like Bo Burnham and Kurt Braunohler) feel cloistered and insular in a way that resembles HBO’s “Crashing,” another Apatow-produced, less successful look at a stand-up comedian and his romantic hang-ups. There’s a scene a little more than halfway through the movie where Kumail has a meltdown in the drive-thu lane of a fast food eatery that’s funny in a kind of context-free, “Family Guy” way without adding anything of substance to the narrative. And as well-drawn as Mr. Nanjiani’s fictional composite is here, the characterization of Emily could use some work. Apart from learning just a little bit about the unhappy marriage she endured before meeting Kumail, we’re not given much in the way of personal information about the character, which means Ms. Kazan has to work overtime to get us to care about the character.
Ms. Kazan does work overtime here. So too does “The Big Sick”. I was able to overlook and ultimately forgive the movie’s flaws because Showalter’s film is about as good an example of its genre as you’re likely to see in a movie theater this year. It’s important to consider why American moviegoers return to these kinds of narratives, and how talented artists like Nanjiani and Gordon are using formulaic templates to tell moving personal versions of their own stories. “The Big Sick” is a small movie that has a very big effect on the viewer, gradually snowballing in its poignancy as scenes and laugh lines run back in your mind. The effect is sort of like replaying the best skits on an old comedy CD, one that only grows funnier and richer in the mind. Judd Apatow may have made his millions on seriocomic portraits of the kinds of people most refer to as losers, but “The Big Sick” is a winner through and through. Grade: B+.
