Hugh Grant’s spirit lives on in Big Sick
He was a GIF before GIFs (in human form): the bed-headed commitmentphobe with just a dash of sly, stuttering devilry.
And today, in the summer of now, two decades later: Hugh Grant is the biggest thing in rom-com all over again.
Just don’t expect to see him in the credits.
In the exalted ecosystem of the movies, Grant’s posh-boy routine may live on in various actors of the day — Eddie Redmayne, Andrew Garfield and Tom Hiddleston, to name a few — but it’s his Four Weddings and a Funeral spirit, in particular, that’s being felt in the sleeper hit The Big Sick, a movie that’s the best romantic comedy in years.
An offbeat take — boy meets girl, girl goes into a coma, boy wins back girl — it’s the all-new love story written by and starring Kumail Nanjiani.
The story is based on his own real-life experiences with his wife and coscreenwriter, Emily Gordon. Amazingly, however, it might not have happened if Nanjiani, as a young boy growing up in Pakistan, wasn’t wooed by Grant’s 1994 breakout.
Not only has Nanjiani (from TV’s Silicon Valley) seen the Richard Curtis-directed classic about 50 times, as he recently revealed, but the whole reason he started doing standup at all is because of “Hugh Grant’s best man speech in the beginning.”
The day Nanjiani married his lady, moreover? Before the wedding, they sat down and watched Four Weddings. Having run into Curtis a few times at various industry events recently — and having totally geeked himself out each time — he even received a package from him on the day of The Big Sick’s opening: four frames from Curtis’s personal reels of the movie.
Like Curtis’s script, Nanjiani’s own movie, though more naturalistic in tone, hits that critical feels-and-laughs sweet spot.
Also: just enough cringe to go with the goo.
A reasonable enough moment to look back?
P is for phenomenon: The ’90s classic, involving a shag-happy Brit who falls for a visiting Yank, was laced with a daffy group of friends who were in the grand British tradition of oddballs — a tradition carried out today in the form of The Great British Baking Show. Not only did the project make more money than any prior British film, and turn the U.K. film company Working Title into a global powerhouse ( Bridget Jones, Love Actually, etc., would follow), but was so big a hit that even a dead poet — W.H. Auden — got a leg-up from it. After the onscreen reading of a poem (“Stop All the Clocks”) by John Hannah at a funeral for his alter-ego lover, Auden’s work sold nearly 300,000 copies. Adding to its legend: The premiere looms as one of the most celebrated movie premieres of all time, thanks to the human eclipse that was Grant’s plus-one, Elizabeth Hurley. Arriving in a Versace stunner known in the annals of fashion as the “safety-pin dress,” the trophygirlfriend became a household name overnight. And she wasn’t even in the flick! Lest we forget: Four Weddings eventually got nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars — up against heavies like Pulp Fiction and Forrest Gump, but a blue moon-enough occurrence for a rom-com. Lest we also: Grant almost didn’t do the role, only being cast after 70 other blokes had come through.
Watching the film again recently, I was struck by what is its biggest flaw: How could our hero choose Carrie, “played more woodenly than Pinocchio by Andie MacDowell, over the beautiful, witty and enigmatic English Rose, Fiona?” channelled by Kristin Scott Thomas, as one critic has remarked.
The film seemed to come along at a very particular moment in the last gasps of 20th-century Britain.
The year 1994 was a love-is-dead time when the fairy tale that was Charles and Di had irrevocably splintered and the same year when, in a widely tracked TV interview, Prince Charles admitted to his infidelity with Camilla. Moreover, it was that in-between period, politicswise, amid Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair — the beige era of PM John Major — and mere years before the explosion of what would come to be known as “Cool Britannia,” the rocket-ship that was the Spice Girls and the validation of London as a culinary capital. This was the context in which Four Weddings arrived.
And reached even a young kid in Karachi.
What a young Nanjiani got from Hugh Grant, thousands of miles away, in a different culture, is hardly different from a young Adele discovering Etta James after finding one of the soul icon’s discs in a bargain bin, as she’s described it. Or, say, a young Ryan Murphy, the celebrated TV creator, being moved enough by Bette Davis, when growing up in the cornfields of Indiana, that he wrote a letter to the screen legend (when he was 10) and, to his own astonishment, spurred a back and forth correspondence that ultimately resulted in Murphy summoning Bette back to life, decades later, through the miniseries Feud: Bette and Joan.
Ditto: the rags-to-riches Oprah Winfrey famously watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show when she was growing up; a seismic influence given its due when Moore herself appeared on Winfrey’s show years later and Oprah had a chance to tell her: “Let me just say, you have no idea what you’ve meant to me. You were the light.”
Inspiration, it moves in mysterious ways.
But I digress, all this talk clearly being much too mawkish for Mr. Grant! Ever the model of ’cross-thepond self-deprecation (“I thought I’d show people I’m not just a onetrick pony. As it turns out, I was,” he once quipped when discussing his 1996 thriller Extreme Measures), he’s also pooh-poohed method-y actors. “They say acting is based upon retrieving past emotions, but I don’t have any emotions to speak of,” the now-56-year-old once said.
He makes it look deceptively easy. Anne Billson, in the Daily Telegraph, put it best when she wrote: “It may be going too far to mention him in the same breath as his name- sake, the peerless Cary Grant. But there are similarities. Both have succeeded in creating a persona that audiences assume is the real them. Both are brilliant at light comedy. And both have a dark side they let slip every now and again.”
And while there have been many iterations of the Hugh Grant blueprint before and after 1994 — tender in Maurice, endearing in Sense and Sensibility, wonderfully Peter Panish in About a Boy, his default persona bottled again for Notting Hill, toe-to-toe (and rueful) with Meryl Streep in Florence Foster Jenkins and deftly mea culpa-ish in the real-life tabloid affair involving Divine Brown — it’s his Four Weddings comet that remains forever etched in film history.
Just ask Kumail.