Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! Hoo boy. Here’s a well-meaning film that should piss off a whole bunch of folks. I talk, of course, of comedians. It’s perfectly OK for people who aren’t funny [read: Robert De Niro] to play comedians in movies, but the standard vehicle for real-life comedians is the six-episode sit-com series fail. Kumail Nanjiani should know; he’s appeared in about fifty of them since 2013. Now, and this is important, if a comedian, especially one with an Asian background, must make a movie, it needs to be a tongue-in-cheek documentary highlighting exactly how out-of-touch his parents are with reality. A thinly disguised biopic masquerading as a romantic comedy? Oh no. That won’t do unless you’ve got a standard romantic lead. Tell me, can Mark Ruffalo play a Pakistani?
The controversy here, of course, is that Pakistani-American and dicey-but-lovable comedian Kumail (Nanjiani) falls for white graduate student and spicy-but-lovable Emily (Zoe Kazan). His go-to move is unique – asking for her name and then spelling it out in Urdu on a cocktail napkin. I imagine were I not married, my go-to unique move would be asking her favorite film and then writing a review of it using kid gloves on all the parts I find objectionable. The Urdu thing seems a better gambit on several fronts. Does it work? She scoffs, but then goes home with him anyway. And when Emily escapes his bed by calling an Uber, her contact rolls over and says he’ll be ready as soon as he gets his pants on.
Kumail’s family life is the kind of sit-com stuff we imagine in the opening paragraph, perhaps entitled “Islama-Bad Boyz.” Every Sunday, he and his brother Naveed (Adeel Akhtar) have dinner at the ‘rents. Their folks sit on opposite ends of the table, Naveed and wife sit on one side while Kumail sits next to an empty chair. And every Sunday, a single, marriage-eligible Pakistani woman who “just happens to be in the neighborhood” knocks on their door, takes the empty seat, and hands Kumail her headshot. Kumail has a cigar box full of headshots in his apartment. The women all come prepared, of course, each versed in Kumail’s P-date profile. Kumail might be able to get away with his comedic calling and his half-assed Muslim-ing (he plays video games when required to pray), but how in the name of Allah is he going to break it to mom and dad that he’s dating Emily?
And, of course, how will Emily’s parents (Holly Hunter and Ray Romano) feel about Kumail? He’d better hope they aren’t “build the wall!” drones. How much does Emily stand to lose on her end? In just a handful of films, Zoe Kazan has quickly become one of my favorite romantic leads. Now I don’t want to seem prejudiced, but The Big Sick is a much better pairing for Zoe than the time I saw her makin’ magic with Harry Potter. Kumail has a normal sized nose, and 
Zoe really needs that in a relationship.
The Big Sick is a romance, but at its core is the question of how romance can occur not when people are incompatible, but when their backgrounds are incompatible. This is a much bigger question than we give it credit for because when it comes up, invariably the film is either a heavy drama where the question becomes the plot, or a comedy, where the film eventually pretends, “Question? What question? Aren’t they cute? Awwwww.” This film never loses the major conflict nor the question itself.
Do you suppose if Kumail Nanjiani were Indian instead of Pakistani, this film would be titled The Big Sikh?
I should point out here that there’s more drama in The Big Sick than there is comedy. This film turns decidedly heavy in Act II for reasons that have nothing to do with miscegenation. Whether this was actual biographical material or not, it gave the film a much greater depth and allowed us to explore relationships we’d never have seen otherwise. The more films I see, the more I’m convinced that screenplay genius lies in the portrayals of the supporting cast, which are both splendid and fairly deep in The Big Sick.
Kumail was a man quite conflicted
In marriage, his path was restricted
Yet seeing a choice
Gave rise to a voice
Of Western lovin’, he’s now addicted
Rated R, 120 Minutes
D: Michael Showalter
W: Emily V. Gordon, Kumail Nanjiani
Genre: Guess who isn’t coming to dinner
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: People who truly, truly believe in freedom
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Geez, take your pick – bigots, racists, anti-miscegenists, patriarchs, matriarchs, Muslims, Christians, religious folk in general, people frightened by the questioning of parental authority. In other words, both five degrees of Trump voter and the people Trump voters are most afraid of.
