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
