Kumail Nanjiani’s The Big Sick
Kumail Nanjiani’s The Big Sick brings serious tension to romantic comedy
REMEMBER Meet the Parents? Girlfriend takes nice boyfriend home to meet her mother and father, and all manner of awkwardness ensues. The Big Sick adds two layers to that rom-com recipe, one novel (girlfriend falls into a medically induced coma) and one increasingly common (boyfriend’s devout Muslim parents are pushing him toward an arranged marriage). That scenario also happens to be the true story of Kumail Nanjiani, a comedian best known for his role on the HBO series Silicon
Valley, and Emily V. Gordon. The film was written by Gordon and Nanjiani, who plays his younger self (as a character also named Kumail), with a big league assist from chief comedy enabler Judd Apatow, who produced.
When we meet Kumail, he’s a flailing stand-up having a one-night stand with sharp, witty Emily (Zoe Kazan). Neither is interested in a relationship, but their obvious attraction leads to a string of quirky dates involving horror B movies and late-night rides home (Kumail works as an Uber driver, a fictionalized detail). His traditional Pakistani parents (Anupam Kher and Zenobia Shroff ) are aggressively campaigning for an arranged marriage; his mother plies him with headshots of hot prospects, like a used car dealer trying to nail down a sale. Kumail lies to his parents to keep Emily a secret and lies to Emily to hide his parents’ wishes. The illness that leads to the movie’s title happens after an enraged Emily discovers the headshots.
The girlfriend-in-a-coma scenario isn’t entirely new, but unlike Pedro Almodóvar’s rhapsodic dramatic comedy Talk
to Her, the medical crisis here is harrowing. The Big Sick, it turns out, is not just about Emily’s coma. It’s about the unremitting terror of being a parent, which unfolds as Kumail navigates Emily’s mysterious health crisis with her terrified parents, played by Ray Romano and Holly Hunter, a feisty scene-stealer. There is comic gold in the cultural disconnect between Kumail and Emily’s congenial, if politically incorrect, father. Nanjiani and Romano have a natural rapport; both actors are TV veterans, and the film sometimes falls into sitcom rhythms. (The most obvious sitcom trope: scenes of Kumail performing at clubs and hanging with snarky fellow comics.) Those rhythms aren’t a bad thing, given the weighty themes of life-threatening illness and racial insensitivity, and director Michael Showalter ( Hello, My
Name Is Doris), who has a knack for the sweet and oddball, navigates the tonal shift from romcom to hospital drama without losing the plot or the humor.
But like so many romantic comedies, The Big Sick finishes predictably, and not just because Gordon and Nanjiani’s backstory is documented. At 124 minutes, it’s also too long. As compelling (even, at times, frightening) as the coma scenes are, Nanjiani’s and Kazan’s chemistry was strong enough that time might have been better spent on their precrisis relationship, which flew by in montage. Leaving the theater, I was also curious about their post-coma life. But that’s all online: They’ve been married for 10 years.