The Big Sick (Movie Review by Bob Racine)

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2 hrs, color, 2017

What a ghastly sounding title – The Big Sick!  But there is nothing sick about the tale this low budget, independent film portrays.  It concerns an interracial romance and a clash of cultures, the stuff of big drama, but the makers preferred to give it a tender, warm hearted comic tone, while leaving much to the imagination in terms of outcome.  

Boy meets Girl and in the most relaxed and pleasant circumstances – at first.  The male in this case is a young Pakistani man named Kumail Nanjiani.  That is his screen star name, and in the film he actually plays himself.  You are never told this in the film’s credits, but the story is very loosely derived from Kumail’s personal life.  A fact-based scenario, one that was Oscar nominated for Best Original Screenplay of 2017 (by Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon)!  All other players are cast to portray fictional characters who represent influences in his life, apparently just a shade shy of the real people.  The direction is by Michael Showalter.

The female is a University of Chicago aspirant named Emily Gardner (Zoe Kazan).  They meet in the very first scene, when she attends a standup comic presentation of his in Montreal (twin city with Chicago) in which Kumail is one of many participants.  She is both an annoyance for him, “heckling” him during his presentation (not really; her outspoken words are actually friendly and flirtatious but regarded by him as a “heckling” interruption), and an instant romantic attraction, which he discovers afterward at the club’s bar. 

Kumail falls head over heels for her and she for him, but of course this presents him with a dilemma.  His very strict Pakistani parents are already hard at work trying to set up an engagement for him with any of an assortment of young Pakistani women.  They want him to marry among his own race, become a doctor or lawyer, and Emily is about as Caucasian and western liberated as a young lady can be.  Kumail is also expected to be a devout Muslim, and his parents do not know that he is having a small crisis of faith, pretending to be in prayer at the expected times each day, but pursuing a more freewheeling life of choice, with his heart inclined toward a career as a standup comic. 

He keeps his newfound romance a secret from them as long as he can, but Emily’s insistence upon meeting his family backs him into a corner and forces him to admit that he has not told them about her, a fact which plummets her into a crisis of the heart – an untimely development that happens to accompany her being stricken with an unrelated life threatening illness.  Her hospitalization soon draws him to her bedside for an extended and anxious time.  But fear not; the movie does not sink, as you might imagine, into tearfully saccharine sogginess, a la “An Affair to Remember”.  It remains intelligent, sturdy, funny and enriching all the way. You might hate to see Emily get sick, because she is far from a helpless little miss; she is a fighter and holds those she loves to a high standard of honesty.   

There is more to this little pleaser than Boy and Girl.  We meet a few individuals who give us some wonderful laid back moments of reflection upon themselves and each other.  I was so pleased to see Holly Hunter once again active after a long absence from the screen.  She is Emily’s scrappy, impulsive, but somewhat emotionally
conflicted mother ready to move heaven or hell for her daughter, perhaps too ready. 
And her father is played by Ray Romano (best known for his starring role in the TV
series “Everybody Loves Raymond”).  I find him more entertaining in his oddball way than anyone else in the picture.  He has some of the best dialogue and his comic timing is superb.  He is brown skinned himself, so I assume he too is Middle Eastern, though he never comes forth and says so.  Kumail also seems to make that assumption.  On one of his exits Kumail says to him, “Here’s to peace in the Middle East”, and Romano looks very embarrassed and self-conscious upon hearing it.  

This is one of those movies in which your love or dislike of it depends almost completely upon how you relate to the characters.  If you like the people portrayed, you like the movie.  If they turn you off, so the movie will displease.  I personally love everybody in it.  I think my love affair with them began the instant the affair of Kumail and Emily got started.  None of them is what you would call larger than life.  None of them plays a character who shows any sign of turning the world upside down or setting any new records.  As just ordinary people from off the streets they won me over.        

So did Kumail’s parents.  I do not mean that they won me over to their rigid point of view; they did not.   It is because we get to see them through Kumail’s very loving eyes.  There is the scene in which he confronts them insisting that he must make his own choices, but his confrontation is not that of a hardnosed rebel; he does not throw down a gauntlet.  They come off as so flat out biased that I think he knows what they will say to him before they say it.   Kumail is somewhat amused – not in a disrespectful sort of way but with a very loving attitude.  He sounds as if he knows they will not always hate him, and there is that powerful moment in which he announces at the dinner table, after he has supposedly been cast out of the family, that he has no intention of leaving the family; he makes the moment a gift to them.  You just have to witness it to believe it and enjoy it.  The mother and father are really lovely people in their own way.  Kumail’s respect for them elicits our respect.

I guess I am saying that the movie bypasses cliché.  It refuses to be what we might expect it to be.  But there is drama; Kumail is put through an agony over the question of Emily’s fate, and his encounter with her parents brings out the strength as well as the awkwardness of everybody involved.  He is not by habit a screamer, but there is a scene in which he takes out his frustration on the operator of a fast food restaurant, though his rage is short lived. He is very self-effacing.  And I was deeply moved when he goes on stage and tries to be funny after he has returned from the hospital and seen Emily in a coma.  It is a short, but personally agonizing, soul baring moment and Nanjiani handles it magnificently. 

“The Big Sick” is not a pace or precedent setter, but its creators know where the heart is and enter it with great affection and humor.  I recommend it for all who value personal friends and family.

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To know about me, consult the autobiographical entry on the website for Dec. 5, 2016.