The Big Sick
A romantic comedy that, for once, actually feels REAL. It's wonderful.
The Big Sick (2017). Grade: B+
Most movies I super-recommend come with conditions. See this one… if you like old movies. Or foreign films. Or violent movies, or challenging ones, or depressing ones, or… etc.
There’s NO conditions on this. I can’t imagine a single possible reason anybody wouldn’t utterly love it. OK, there’s some mild cussing, but it’s Bull Durham level of cussing, it’s not gonna offend most people. And anybody who would be offended is not gonna be reading this fugging site, anyways.
Plus, the guy who’s cussing has a girlfriend in the hospital, and she might die. Cut the dude some slack.
Comedian Kumail Nanjiani plays comedian Kumail Nanjiani, a first-generation Pakistani-American doing standup in Chicago. His comedy career is… alright. He’s got a good set, but it hasn’t taken off yet. He’s looking at options for making it more successful.
Meanwhile, his family is, well, not too thrilled by the comedy thing. To them, it’s a hobby. They all want him to be a doctor, lawyer, architect, something like that. And Nanjiani is little-fibbing them about this; he says he’s working towards a “real” career, when he ain’t. Just like he dutifully tells them he’s going down in the basement to say his evening prayers; he’s not, he’s doinking around on his phone or with a cricket bat. (He’s not an out-and-out atheist, he’s just not an especially devout Muslim.)
What’s more, his family want him to marry a nice Pakistani girl. So they keep setting him up. Inviting eligible singles to their weekly family dinners. Every time, Nanjiani’s mom will say the ladies “just dropped by.” It’s incredibly forced and awkward. He really wants no part of it, but he’s too chicken to tell his family to cut it out.
One night, doing his comedy show, Nanjiani meets a bright, funny, pretty gal, Zoe Kazan — who’s lily-white and very much NOT Pakistani. They hit it off anyways. As is normal in rom-coms, they both swear they aren’t interested in a serious, long-term relationship… but, pretty soon, they’re spending a lot of time together. Things are getting serious.
There’s a problem, and you know what it is. It’s Nanjiani’s family. He can’t tell them about Kazan, and he can’t tell Kazan that his family is dead-set on him marrying a Pakistani girl. That he’s afraid his family will utterly shut him out if he marries a honky American lady. (And they did sacrifice a lot to move here, for their sons to have better opportunities. By their lights, it's only fair the sons respect their wishes.)
Eventually, Kazan finds out about this — and here’s where I’ll give my one and only, ever, piece of twinsbrewer’s Romantic Advice; fellas, whatever you think you’re hiding from your significant others, they are gonna, eventually, find out. Count on it!
And when she finds out, Kazan is, understandably, pretty furious. Of course, it’s not Nanjiani’s fault that his family is what it is; but he should have said something about this. Maybe not on the first date, but by this point, he shoulda mentioned it. And how it’s gonna be a problem they’ll have to work out together. He really has been a total chickens**t in both ways, to them and to her.
So Kazan walks out on him. And he seems sad, but, in his mind, it’s gotta be family first. He feels bad that Kazan’s gone — he’d be absolutely destroyed if his family was gone.
Until, a few weeks later, when he gets a call in the middle of the night.
It’s one of Kazan’s friends. Kazan is horribly, horribly sick. She’s in the hospital, and somebody HAS to be there. Kazan’s parents live in a different city. The friend was at the hospital, but she’s got final exams tomorrow, she’s gotta go get some sleep. Somebody needs to show up.
Nanjiani, maybe out of guilt, shows up. And Kazan is still pissed at him… but she’s getting sicker. The doctor takes him outside the room and says, we need to intubate her. Are you her husband? We need somebody to sign these papers.
Nanjiani hesitates. Then the doctor repeats, we have to do this, or she’s gonna die. I’m gonna ask again… are you her husband? Somebody’s gotta sign this.
(The doctor knows he’s not her husband.)
Anybody who’s ever had a loved one, a significant other or family member, very quickly get very sick will absolutely love how relatable this all feels. How all of a sudden, you are being asked to make decisions on things you don’t understand, and it’s all such a rush.1 Trying to write down all the technical, medical terms the doctors start throwing at you. As if looking them up later is gonna help you at all! But you feel so helpless, you want to do SOMETHING.
Eventually, Kazan’s parents show up — Holly Hunter and Ray Romano. They know who Nanjiani is; and Hunter is LIVID at him. The way he didn’t come clean about his family’s objections. It’s obvious that Kazan was totally heartbroken, and shared this with her mom. And mom is not pleased. Eventually, they tell Nanjiani to just, go home. We don’t need you here.
And, in his first moment of real courage, Nanjiani doesn’t go home. He’s gonna stick this out.
It feels like I’ve given you the whole movie plot, here, and in a way, I have. I’ve only described it up to about halfway through, but that’s the plot — everything that happens from here on out is just a continuation of these plot threads.
But I promise you that knowing, essentially, what happens is not gonna ruin or “spoil” this movie for you. You will love it anyways.
Largely because of an outstanding script, by Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon. (Kazan is playing Gordon in the movie, so there’s a spoiler for you; these two wrote a script together about what brought them together.) It’s the one romantic comedy where, even before the hospital stuff happens, there are so many moments that ring absolutely true. (There’s a particularly classic one where Kazan really, REALLY wants to go to the diner across the street in the middle of the night for a very sensible reason, and you will absolutely empathize with why she doesn’t want to say what that reason is.) Sure, they fight, then fall in love, that’s the formula. Yet this is so much more than formula. These characters seem completely real.
It’s such a good script that I’m furious it didn’t win all the Awards. OK — Get Out did, and that’s fair. You can flip a coin and pick which one is “better.” They’re both fantastic. And either one is better than any movie released the following year, so that just shows you how stupid the arbitrary rules for awards are. (And Jordan Peele cast Nanjiani in the very first episode of his new Twilight Zone series.)
There are two mild quibbles I have with this movie. One is that we don’t really get enough of the story told from Kazan’s perspective. Part of that’s unavoidable — she spends a third of the movie in a coma! But, for example, how did that friend get Nanjiani’s number? The one who called him to say she was in the hospital?
It’s not a big deal, because even though the script is (mostly) from Nanjiani’s point of view, it’s sure not self-glorifying. He knows he was a chicken; to his family, and to his girlfriend, for not telling either the full truth. And to the women his mom’s setting him up with, too! One that Mom brings over after Nanjiani/Kazan’s breakup is actually funny — she does a neat magic trick. Under different circumstances, he and she might have hit it off; but he just hates the idea of arranged marriage so much, it could never work. When Nanjiani tells her this, she’s justifiably ticked.
The slightly bigger problem is Judd Apatow, the producer, who did have a hand in shaping the script, and his instincts are strictly commercial. I’m not gonna be like most critics, who praised Apatow to the high heavens when his movies (Knocked Up, The 40-Year-Old Virgin) were hits, and decry his formulaic side now that his movies aren’t hits. I liked ‘em fine then, and like ‘em fine now, for what they are. Slick crowdpleasers that don’t actually have anybody in them I could possibly recognize as an actual human. They’re like Nora Ephron movies for guys, and that’s fine. Amusing stuff is fine. But the very, very last scene here has that patented Apatow slickness — I don’t believe it. (And it didn’t happen in real life.)
What else didn’t happen in real life? Well, there’s a marital issue between Hunter and Romano that’s completely made up; it still, mostly, works in the film. On a “making of” special feature, Nanjiani says he should have given his family more credit; they ended up being less inflexible than he feared. Nanjiani and the real Emily V. Gordon hadn’t broken up when she got sick; yet they were headed in that direction. And there’s one scene with cue cards that’s cute… but I don’t quite buy it. Maybe it happened, maybe it didn’t, it just doesn’t feel like a fit for this material. (Where a scene where Nanjiani’s dad gives him food absolutely DOES fit.)
None of those criticisms detract from how funny and touching the script is, or how winning the performers are. Zoe Kazan was terrific in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (though it’s a very depressing story!) and terrific in Meek’s Cutoff, and she’s terrific here — somehow, she manages to be mousy and vibrant at the same time. Kumail Nanjiani is always fun, even when he’s in dreck; the ONLY funny thing in the new History of the World Mel Brooks series was a sketch with Nanjiani pitching the Kama Sutra to modern book publishers. To those who haven’t seen Ray Romano in Paddleton, he can actually act; he’s not bad at it, not at all. (Don’t confuse Paddleton with Paddington — one’s about a guy whose friend is dying of cancer, the other is a CGI bear!)
And if you don’t already love Holly Hunter, GET THE HECK OFFA MY BLOG!
Nanjiani’s family are wonderful, too. Adeel Akhtar, Anupam Kher, Zenobia Shroff, Shenaz Treasurywala. Kher, as the dad, is a huge, huge star in Indian cinema — he’s been in over 500 movies. Shroff is fully convincing as the devout, anti-assimilation mom; in real life, Shroff is an actor, a comic, a writer, and has a master’s degree in psychology. Akhtar, the brother, has a law degree but chose to be an actor; these people know the kind of family pressure to get a “real job” that Nanjiani is writing about here! And this blog wouldn’t be this blog if I didn’t point out that Akhtar, who is British, was detained by the FBI after the September 2001 terrorist attacks, because he “resembled” somebody on a terrorist watch list.
(At one point, Ray Romano asks Nanjiani, as a Muslim, what he thinks about the 2001 attacks, and he’s kinda ticked about being asked, and responds with a really tasteless joke. It doesn’t land! But it’s very funny.)
Kurt Braunohler, Aidy Bryant, Bo Burnham, David Alan Grier, and Ed Herbstman play other comics; they all feel real enough (because they are actually are comics). Credit to Herbstman for being the one comic who the others think is a hack; that’s a thankless role, but a necessary one; it shows us what Nanjiani’s afraid of becoming.
The direction, by Michael Showalter, is blessedly simple. This isn’t a movie that doinks around with too much unnecessary camera movement, yet it doesn’t feel visually stilted, either. It’s showing us what we need to see, letting the actors do their thing, and encouraging them when they’re doing their best. A few of Romano’s lines sound improvised, in a good way; and one scene where Hunter goes ape on a rude comedy heckler wasn’t in the script, it was inspired by something Hunter once did at a tennis match. (Of which Hunter said, “it was a little intense, and probably was not really cool to do … But I found myself doing it, and Kumail and I talked about that, then Kumail and Emily wrote the scene and it felt right.”)
You absitively, posolutely cannot go wrong watching this movie. I promise you, you will really, really like it. In fact, I don’t know why you haven’t seen it already! Go watch it! Maybe with your newest girlfriend/boyfriend’s parents! Um… maybe not that last one. I’m not saying it’s a bad idea, per se, it’s just not a twinsbrewer’s Romantic Advice I’d necessarily heed. Depends on the situation. But the fact that you can’t hide important stuff from your partner, not forever? Take that one to the bank, baby.
And you might be wearing some really goofy clothes in the hospital. Nanjiani is facing these decisions as he’s wearing a “Swinging Medallions” shirt. That sounds dirty, but it isn’t. It’s just the name of a goofy 1960s party band. Their biggest hit was “Double Shot of My Baby’s Love.” Click on it if ya wanna. It’s catchy. Sometimes catchy and good are not the same thing, though.