Culture-clash romcom that you can’t help falling for
From Sleep to Short, there’s a certain jaw-jutting aplomb in calling your film The Big anything: it turns the title into a euphemism to be muttered darkly by those in the know, ideally while wearing a trench coat. The Big Sick, the latest confessional comedy from uberproducer Judd Apatow, doesn’t quite fit the pattern. There’s no widespread degeneration afoot here, either medical or moral. But for its central couple, times are testing enough.
The sickness in The Big Sick is adult-onset Still’s disease, a rare form of arthritis. And the sufferer is Emily (Zoe Kazan), who spends a large part of the film in a medically induced coma, while doctors and nurses do their utmost to restore her to health.
Here’s the hook: shortly before falling ill, Emily falls in love, passionately and mutually, with a Pakistani-american comedian called Kumail (Kumail Nanjiani). But through a mix of adverse circumstances and good old-fashioned cowardice, Kumail doesn’t introduce her to his doting but deeply conservative mother and father (Zenobia Shroff and Anupam Kher), who are busy arranging a marriage to a Muslim woman on his behalf. Dismayed by his reticence, Emily calls off their relationship, but once she’s comatose, Kumail finds himself back at her side, doing a kind of affable penance.
As such, The Big Sick folds down the middle, beginning as a culture-clash rom-com before modulating into a meet-the-parents-style cringe ’em up. This latter part, not unappealingly, has Kumail bonding awkwardly in the hospital waiting room with Emily’s mother and father (Holly Hunter and Ray Romano) – even though his relationship with their daughter may, for all he knows, be done and dusted. This daintily particular premise has been culled from life experience: Nanjiani co-wrote the script with his own wife, whose name is also Emily, and based it on their own partnership and her battle with adult-onset Still’s.
Yet the film bears its real-world resonance as lightly as a button, thanks both to the steady supply of well-turned one-liners and the rippling chemistry between Nanjiani and a never-better Kazan, who’s so disarmingly funny here that I kept catching myself pulling puppy-dog faces whenever she was on screen. (One of the best things a romantic comedy can do is involve you in the falling-in-love bit.) As for the mixed-race aspect, it sticks out in story terms only: Kumail’s parents are dismayed by their son’s choice of partner when their liaison comes to light, but the film doesn’t accord the romance itself special progressive status. It’s just a fruitful source of comic cross-purposes.
The further it strays from this adorable core, The Big Sick gets on to shakier ground – and this being an Apatow production, it strays often and at a leisurely ramble, with the spark fading from some scenes so gradually you only notice after it’s already fizzled out. Many of them involve a handful of Nanjiani’s comedic contemporaries (Bo Burnham, Aidy Bryant, Kurt Braunohler), who appear in “frenemy” supporting roles – they’re colleagues at his stand-up club, all vying for limited slots at an forthcoming festival – but the standard of their material veers between mediocre and excruciating, and not for the most part on purpose. As Emily’s parents, Hunter and Romano don’t quite work up the hit rate you want them to, either: they’re a fun mismatch, but despite a glut of screen time, neither role feels like much more than an extended cameo.
Spare a thought too for the various young Pakistani women who keep dropping by Kumail’s parents’ house as prospective brides. The film tries very hard to play fair on arrangedmarriage culture, neither dismissing nor excusing it – but a scene in which one auditionee (Vella Lovell) sets out her own reservations with the process feels more like due diligence than the revelatory moment it’s clearly positioned as.
Director Michael Showalter treads a stylistic line between low-key and dreary, which was probably meant to be less obtrusive than it is – but it never comes close to dampening down its leading couple’s inextinguishable appeal. Despite the aches and creaks in its extremities, The Big Sick is in rude health where it counts.