The Big Sick
Directed by: Michael Showalter
Written by: Kumail Nanjiani & Emily V. Gordon
Starring: Kumail Nanjiani, Zoe Kazan, Holly Hunter, Ray Romano, Anupam Kher, Zenobia Shroff, Adeel Akhtar, Aidy Bryant, Bo Burnham, Kurt Braunohler, Vella Lovell, Myra Lucretia Taylor, Jeremy Shamos, David Alan Grier, Ed Herbstman
Comedy/Romance - 119 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 29 Jun 2017
Written by: Kumail Nanjiani & Emily V. Gordon
Starring: Kumail Nanjiani, Zoe Kazan, Holly Hunter, Ray Romano, Anupam Kher, Zenobia Shroff, Adeel Akhtar, Aidy Bryant, Bo Burnham, Kurt Braunohler, Vella Lovell, Myra Lucretia Taylor, Jeremy Shamos, David Alan Grier, Ed Herbstman
Comedy/Romance - 119 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 29 Jun 2017
I appreciate comedies about stand-up comics. They can be documentaries like Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedian (2002) and Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop (2011), topical like The Aristocrats (2005), cross the line into drama like Funny People (2009) and Obvious Child (2014), or even go autobiographical like Mike Birbiglia’s Sleepwalk with Me (2012). Kumail Nanjiani’s The Big Sick is a cross between autobiography and dramatic tendencies. What I thought was going to be a light-hearted but culturally sensitive rom-com pulls a titanic shift and switches tracks into hospital drama territory, somehow incorporating humor along with the tears. Even at its most dire points, The Big Sick goes for laughs as it tells a somewhat true version of how Nanjiani met, fell in love with, and sat by his wife’s sick bed.
Kumail Nanjiani (Central Intelligence) plays a version of his younger self, even using his own name. We watch him play small comedy clubs trying to make a name in the Chicago comedy scene. It’s a fine start to the film watching a group of comedians rip each other backstage with constructive criticism such as, “He’s like Daniel Day-Lewis, but he sucks.” We also meet Kumail’s conservative Muslim, Pakistani family who gives him some leeway to pursue his stand-up dreams but reminds him what awaits him down the road, a real profession like the law and an arranged marriage. Kumail’s mother, Sharmeen (Zenobia Shroff), scores with her own not subtle at all dig when she says, “You know who I think should stand up is Malala.” Score one for mom.
Kumail Nanjiani (Central Intelligence) plays a version of his younger self, even using his own name. We watch him play small comedy clubs trying to make a name in the Chicago comedy scene. It’s a fine start to the film watching a group of comedians rip each other backstage with constructive criticism such as, “He’s like Daniel Day-Lewis, but he sucks.” We also meet Kumail’s conservative Muslim, Pakistani family who gives him some leeway to pursue his stand-up dreams but reminds him what awaits him down the road, a real profession like the law and an arranged marriage. Kumail’s mother, Sharmeen (Zenobia Shroff), scores with her own not subtle at all dig when she says, “You know who I think should stand up is Malala.” Score one for mom.
The Big Sick’s first act is pure meet cute, awkward dating, and probing whether this is the person for you. You know you are truly courting when you learn your new girlfriend does in fact have bowel movements; a stark realization all new Cupid-infatuated couples must confront. Kumail’s girlfriend, Emily (Zoe Kazan, What If), easily holds her own against the man attempting to become a professional comic. Undergoing the routine, but crucial, examination on whether or not she likes the same movies Kumail is obsessed with, she wryly observes, “I love it when men test my taste.”
The cultural barrier inevitably breaks Kumail and Emily apart as she realizes he will never tell his family about the white girl he’s seeing and the cliché that he will eventually marry a Pakistani girl crushes his future. Kumail’s brother, Naveed (Adeel Akhtar, Pan), empathizes with his younger brother about experimenting with the local girls before the inevitable marriage arrangements, but he assures him love will grow later on. Since The Big Sick is at its heart a comedy, the brothers have this conversation in a diner where they promise the family at the next table they hate terrorists after they raise their voices at one another.
I assumed The Big Sick was going to end up in a standard comic narrative routine whereby Kumail would make his apology to Emily on stage during a bit and ‘come out’ to his family that he’s in romantic love with an American girl. Oh, how wrong I was. So fast you may experience whiplash, Emily is hospitalized and put into a medically-induced coma. Her parents (Holly Hunter; Song to Song and Ray Romano; Ice Age: Collision Course) show up and the next hour follows Kumail hesitantly and awkwardly attempting to establish a rapport with them. The parents, already in on the fact Emily and Kumail are no longer together, take a while to puzzle out why Kumail persistently lurks around the hospital, but their eventual détente and mutual understanding hints at that familiar Judd Apatow heart we usually see from his films. Apatow is a producer here and gave Nanjiani the opportunity to make this film.
Nanjiani co-wrote the script with his wife, the real Emily, and it sold for a bundle at Sundance to Amazon Studios. Director Michael Showalter follows in Apatow’s Funny People footsteps, The Big Sick is deeper than you know going in and about 15 minutes too long. Also, for such a fresh rom-com narrative, The Big Sick is an off-putting, clumsy title. It fails to hint at Kumail’s introspection, the film’s main arc. While watching Emily lay motionless in a coma, Kumail asks the big questions: who am I, how am I as a boyfriend, a son, a Muslim? The Big Sick doesn’t stand out from its rom-com peers merely because Nanjiani is not the white, Christian male archetype Hollywood normally puts in this role, it’s because it uses humor to lead the audience through some heavy shit. The autobiographical stand-up film was a risk, but we all come out of it a bit more appreciative on the other side.
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