Film review

  • The Big Sick

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Michael Showalter (2017)

    ‘An awkward true story,’ announces the poster for The Big Sick – a little awkwardly.  The true story is that of Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V Gordon, the married couple who wrote Michael Showalter’s comedy.  The Big Sick is based on the early history of their relationship.  A serious illness that really did strike Gordon down figures prominently.  Her alter ego, renamed Emily Gardner, is played on screen by Zoe Kazan.  Kumail Nanjiani plays himself.  The film is too long (124 minutes) and the excessive length could have something to do with its real-life basis.  Gordon’s recovery from illness may well have seemed a long haul to her and Nanjiani but the cinema audience receives it – and the halting resumption of their romance – as conventional devices to delay the necessary romcom happy ending.  In spite of this, The Big Sick is absorbing and perceptive and, except for its title, one of the year’s most appealing films so far.

    Like Get Out, another good new American film of 2017, The Big Sick has at its centre an interracial romance.  Unlike Jordan Peele’s horror comedy, Showalter’s film is hardly alarming – and subversive only from the point of view of traditional Pakistani Muslims, which Kumail’s parents (Anupam Kher and Zenobia Shroff) are.  The family came to America when Kumail and his elder brother Naveed (Adeel Akhtar) were boys but the parents cleave to customary cultural expectations of their sons.  Naveed has acceded to an arranged marriage, in which he’s now content.  Visits to the family home in Chicago of a succession of potential Pakistani brides for Kumail are a running joke in the film.  Each time he goes to see his parents, so does the next candidate to be his wife:  his mother unfailingly pretends that the young woman’s call is a chance drop-in.  Kumail is exasperated but he’s to some extent a closet rebel.  During family meals, he’ll excuse himself between main course and dessert for a prayer session.  Alone in his room, he looks at his phone instead of praying but he doesn’t openly argue with his parents’ religious orthodoxy.  As well as failing to get married, he’s proving a disappointment to them on the jobs front.  He writes and performs stand-up comedy, driving an Uber cab on the side to pay rent on a tiny apartment.  (His flatmate is Chris (Kurt Braunohler), an ever-hopeful, always hopeless fellow stand-up.)  In one of his onstage routines, Kumail lists, in descending order of desirability, the occupations that Pakistani parents want to see their children in – doctor, lawyer, ISIS, stand-up comedian.

    It’s during a club performance that he first encounters Emily.  She calls out – according to Kumail, heckles him – from the audience.  They have a drink afterwards and go back to his place.  She’s a graduate student in Chicago and preparing for exams, a main reason why she repeatedly tells Kumail she doesn’t want a serious relationship at present.  They’re in one, however, until Emily discovers a cigar box containing photographs of all the prospective brides lined up for Kumail.  He truthfully assures her that they mean nothing to him but admits he’s also keeping Emily a secret from his parents and is uncertain whether he and she can have a future together, in view of his family situation.  Emily walks out on him.  The next time Kumail sees her, several weeks later, she’s in a hospital bed.  On the eve of her exams, she falls ill with a mystery virus.  One of her friends contacts Kumail, asking him to visit Emily in hospital.  The doctors are anxious to put her in a medically induced coma; in the absence of anyone else to sign the consent form, it’s Kumail who uneasily does so, before contacting Emily’s parents.  They hotfoot it to Chicago and a series of hospital vigils begins.  These are doubly tense, thanks to Emily’s serious condition and the fact that her mother, who knows the circumstances of her daughter’s break-up with Kumail, is predisposed against him.

    Up to this point, the film has had plenty of acute charm and witty lines.  Once The Big Sick goes into hospital, it achieves something more difficult.  The tone naturally alters but, rather than inserting a slab of sentimental drama to follow the predominating comedy of the earlier stages, the direction and script mix funny and serious convincingly.  Michael Showalter is much helped in this by Holly Hunter and Ray Romano, as Emily’s parents, Beth and Terry.  Hunter and Romano create persuasive eccentrics and have crack comic timing; they’re wonderfully entertaining.   Beth and Terry are something of an odd couple geographically and culturally – she’s from rural North Carolina, he’s a New Yorker.  It transpires there’s been bad blood between them since Terry was briefly unfaithful.  After the ice between the Gardners and Kumail has begun to melt, each of Beth and Terry has a one-to-one scene with him.  Credible as the outpourings that can occur talking with someone you hardly know and don’t expect to see much in future, these scenes are among the best in the film.  They include such cherishable exchanges as:

    Terry:  Let me tell you something.  Love isn’t easy.  That’s why they call it love.

    Kumail:  I don’t really get that-

    Terry:  I know.  I just thought I could start saying something and something smart would come out.

    Beth and Terry are splendid individual creations but The Big Sick is too simply approving of Emily’s background and ‘freedom’ in order to oppose it to Kumail’s lack of the same.  Although it’s refreshing – and pleasing proof of the freedom of expression that Kumail Nanjiani has actually achieved – to see this kind of cultural critique on the cinema screen (and doing well at the box office), the constraints and anachronisms of Kumail’s heritage are pushed too hard, in efforts to generate both comedy and conflict.   A few things register poignantly, especially a scene in which one of Kumail’s brides-in-waiting (Vella Lovell) tells him how wearying she finds the arranged marriage set-up.  She makes it clear too that she’s genuinely attracted to Kumail but he still says no.  There’s some forced and implausible plotting in this aspect of the film, however.   It’s surprising that Emily, as a psychology graduate student, is stunned by the revelation of Pakistani marriage customs and Kumail’s divided feelings about his family (they infuriate him but he loves them nonetheless).  The rift between Kumail and Emily may well reflect the experiences of the real Nanjiani and Gordon; in the movie, the motivation for it seems insufficient, a convenient contrivance.

    Kumail Nanjiani, a well-known name in American television but new to me, evidently loves the stand-up world where he earned his comedy stripes.  I’m not sure if the unfunny stand-up stuff in the film is always meant to be so; at any rate, the script tends to be funnier outside the club spotlight.  (The several Islamist terrorist jokes in the script are uncomfortable but they’re good.)  Nanjiani, the embodiment of the film’s unassuming wit, underplays charmingly:  he conveys Kumail’s emotions gently and makes them genuine – and you can see this is down to acting skill rather than because he’s re-enacting autobiography.  It’s a tribute to him and Zoe Kazan, given their different starting points, that they seem on the same performing wavelength.  Kazan too is emotionally believable:  you miss her while Emily’s unconscious (which she is for a fair amount of screen time).  In the supporting cast, Holly Hunter and Ray Romano are outstanding but Adeel Akhtar does well again, in spite of a skinny role.

    The Big Sick develops a leitmotif of endings being threatened and somehow avoided.   This begins at an early stage.  After she and Kumail first have sex, Emily rings for a cab to take her home from his apartment:  the phone of the nearest Uber driver goes off, next to her in bed.  She tells him a number of times subsequently that it’s over but it’s not.  Then they really do part, until she’s ill; then it looks as if her life may be about to end.  A similar pattern emerges in Kumail’s family relationships, once the tensions between him and his parents have burst into the open:  they disown him but he refuses to be disowned.  Kumail is an unusual and winning combination – an apparently unassertive fellow who doesn’t take no for an answer.  Once Emily’s out of hospital, the dynamic changes somewhat.  It’s up to her, the reluctant one, to get the relationship with Kumail properly restarted.  At the very last moment she does what she has to do.  He’s moved to New York and is performing in a club there when a young woman in the audience heckles him … This moment-of-reunion-that-will-last-a-lifetime is a generic requirement – so is the reconciliation between Emily’s parents that wraps up their subplot neatly.  But there’s enough talent, truth and originality in The Big Sick to send you out of the cinema in a very good mood.

    1 August 2017

  • Dunkirk

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Christopher Nolan (2017)

    The Dunkirk evacuation and Christopher Nolan sound like a mismatch:  the little ships and Nolan’s penchant for technical grandiosity don’t go together.  Evidently aware of such prejudiced expectations, Nolan has come up with what seems, on paper at least, a neat solution.  His screenplay for Dunkirk, as well as allowing him plenty of scope for spectacular land and sky warfare, includes a human interest story aboard one of the flotilla of private boats.  Nolan’s description of the ordeal of a handful of soldiers and airmen aims for in-the-thick-of-it immediacy and intensity; the happenings on the representative little ship are dramatically conventional and separate.  This is an unsatisfying combination, though it’s proving a highly successful one, critically and commercially.

    The film begins in the streets of Dunkirk, where a British private, Tommy [sic], walks under a rain of German propaganda leaflets; within a few screen seconds, he and other Tommies are trying desperately to dodge a hail of German machine-gun bullets.  The opening is Nolanesque all right:  the pieces of paper falling through the air are a self-conscious image – so too is the screenful of fleeing soldiers, shot down one by one until Tommy alone escapes to progress into the action proper.  This comprises a threefold structure, reflecting the different timeframes of the evacuation for land, sea and air forces – one week, one day and one hour respectively – in late May and early June 1940.  Each of the three narrative components is introduced by an explanatory note on screen.  The viewer is meant to commit the notes to heart, in order both to make sense of what follows and to appreciate the structural ingenuity.  At the same time, Nolan wants to convey a sense of the awful physical realities – to make audiences feel they’re in the cockpit with Spitfire pilots and hiding with soldiers in a grounded trawler.  He uses his formidable hi-tech skills to create startling sequences of planes crash-landing in the sea and the terrifying claustrophobia of being trapped underwater.  These highlights occasionally make an emotional impression but more often merely confirm the director’s film-making knowhow.  The complicated timeline doesn’t amount to much in dramatic terms.  The army personnel barely register as individuals.  If we do keep a handle on what’s going on, it’s thanks to not being fully involved.

    Things are very different on the boat en route from Weymouth to Dunkirk, which isn’t typical of the little ships.  Rather than being requisitioned by the Royal Navy, the craft is crewed by its owner, Mr Dawson (Mark Rylance), his teenage son Peter (Tom Glynn-Carney) and, at the last minute, Peter’s friend George (Barry Keoghan), eager for adventure and to get his name in the papers.  They rescue and take on board a soldier (Cillian Murphy), the traumatised survivor of a U-boat attack.  When he learns that Dawson is heading for the French coast rather than back to England, the soldier goes crazy and tries to take control of the boat.  In the scuffle that follows, George falls downstairs, sustaining what proves to be a fatal head injury.  Later on, the boat rescues Spitfire pilot Collins (Jack Lowden) and soldiers including Tommy (Fionn Whitehead) and Alex (Harry Styles), whose life Tommy saved on the pier at Dunkirk.  Collins learns from Peter Dawson that his elder brother was a Hurricane pilot, lost in action in the early weeks of the war.  When they eventually return to Weymouth, Peter goes along to the local newspaper to make his ill-fated friend’s dream come true.  Christopher Nolan must mean for there to be synergy between the neatly packaged story (and backstory) of the Dawson crew and the high-octane hyper-realism of the major action sequences.  But they connect in only the most basic way – the succession of men rescued by Mr Dawson are switching from one half of the film to the other.

    The concentration on a single little ship makes it hard for the uninitiated to understand how the Dunkirk evacuation delivered 300,000 men to (at least temporary) safety.  That said, Nolan is sometimes impatient to indulge his natural pomposity and the most flagrant instance of this occurs when he cuts to a shot of the little ships flotilla approaching the French coast, well before the tale of Dawson’s boat is complete.  The score by Hans Zimmer (the ideal musical collaborator for Nolan) suddenly goes all Elgar’s Nimrod, as it also does in later, supposedly heart-swelling moments.  Some of the last bits of Dunkirk, however, are understated and more genuinely affecting.  It’s corny and predictable that George is posthumously a front-page hero; but, when Mr Dawson reads the story, Mark Rylance’s silent, contained pride in what Peter has done, is eloquent.  Back in England, Tommy, in a train compartment, also reads a newspaper and the text of Churchill’s ‘We will fight on the beaches’ speech aloud to Alex.  The final, brief shot of Fionn Whitehead’s face is, for Nolan, unusually complex and humanly imaginative.  Tommy looks puzzled.  Almost foreseeing the Dunkirk mythology that was to develop subsequently, his face seems to ask, ‘Is Churchill talking about me?’  There are repeated elegant compositions of tiny figures arranged, in various configurations, in a vast beachscape.  The film’s palette is wearyingly tasteful, though.  The cinematographer is Hoyte van Hoytema but sand and sea in Dunkirk often suggest a Farrow and Ball colour chart.  Though it’s an appalling sight, it’s also a chromatic relief when a sinking ship spills oil that ignites and the water is suddenly aflame.

    As suggested above, Mark Rylance again does fine work:  it’s remarkable how substantial a personality he creates from the material he’s given.  Kenneth Branagh has a good steely authority as the senior officer in charge on the Dunkirk pier.  The two Spitfire pilots are Tom Hardy and Jack Lowden.  With most of his face obscured by his pilot’s mask, Hardy is admirably expressive:  it’s almost anti-climactic when, after making an emergency landing, he removes the disguise (‘Yes, it was me all along …’)  Lowden makes by some way the best impression of the newer actors.  I don’t like to sound even older than I am but I often struggled to hear what the other youngsters were saying.  I got every word of Kenneth Branagh and Mark Rylance.

    31 July 2017

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