Rom com. Sitcom. Disease of the week. Stand-up comedy backstage drama. My wacky immigrant parents.
“The Big Sick” lives in all of these benighted genres and grows out of them. Thankfully, the often slick, just occasionally slack “Sick” is first and foremost an autobiography, and while it’s been designed to deliver maximum laughs and emotion, a quirky authenticity hovers over even its most manipulative moments.
“Silicon Valley’s” Kumail Nanjiani and his wife, Emily V. Gordon, wrote the screenplay about their rather unusual courtship. He plays himself in the movie, in his struggling Chicago comedian days (best running joke of the whole thing is that he’s wittier in his personal interactions than he is onstage). Emily’s played by Zoe Kazan at her most beguiling: Smart, often funnier than Kumail, sexy as all get out, adorably self-conscious at times.
They’re a great couple, until she discovers why she hasn’t met his family.
His parents are traditional Pakistanis, and every dinner Kumail attends at their impressive suburban home is interrupted by the “surprise” arrival of a young Muslim woman auditioning for an arranged marriage. Kumail doesn’t have the heart — nor the stones — to tell his folks he’s in love withher, and when Emily finds out she is understandably devastated.
So, that’s the end of that.
Until Emily winds up in a medically induced coma in a second-rate hospital, where the doctors can’t figure out what’s wrong with her. Kumail attends — can’t help himself, poignantly — and meets her parents. They have heard ALL about him, and while Emily sleeps the film shifts gears into a wonderfully prickly, and persuasively humane, study of this new, three-way relationship.
Holly Hunter and Ray Romano bring their crankiest A-games to the elder Gordons. She’s a coiled fireball as the judgmental yet strangely approachable Beth; he’s a shambling pile of hangdog regret as Terry, and they’re the most believable married couple we’ve seen in many a movie.
Oddly, the same cannot be said for the actors playing Kumail’s ’rents, Zenobia Shroff and Anupam Kher, whose characters are written just slightly better than old-country burlesques, even during their most emotionally charged moments.
That’s the one glaring slip-up in a movie rich with both serious and comic observations about people and their relationships. Throw in some pretty believable showbiz details, medical melodrama and ethnic conflicts (internal as well as the bros who ask “You a terrorist?” kind), and you have a movie that continuously transcends the cliches of every formula it promiscuously flits around.
Judd Apatow, no surprise, was a producer; the film might benefit from a little trimming. Director Michael Showalter moves up in writing and performance quality from “Hello, My Name Is Doris,” keeps some pretty complicated narrative traffic moving mostly smoothly and displays no particular style, which is really just as well, since this is truly Nanjiani’s show, and only the ones he loves should be allowed to mess with it to any significant extent.
The Big Sick
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R: For sex, language, drug use
Starring: Kumail Nanjiani, Zoe Kazan, Holly Hunter, Ray Romano
Director: Michael Showalter
Running time: 2 hours
Playing: ArcLight, Hollywood; AMC 15, Century City; Landmark, West L.A.