The Big Sick is the best movie of the year.
Now that we’ve gotten the standard “Yay or Nay?” question settled, we can just dive right in and talk about why this is the best movie of the year and why you, the good consumer that you are, should do whatever you have to do to inject this movie into your soul. It’s available on Amazon VOD right now and will be on DVD and Blu on 9/19.
Directed by Michael (Wet Hot American Summer, They Came Together) Showalter and produced by Judd (You Know Who Judd Apatow Is) Apatow, The Big Sick was co-written by and stars Kumail Nanjiani, who you might know from his terrific work on Silicon Valley, or his terrific stand-up, or his terrific video game podcast ‘The Indoor Kids’, or his terrific X-Files podcast, ‘The X-Files Files’ (which was reportedly a hugely critical component in The X-Files being brought back, netting Nanjiani a juicy supporting role in one of the revival’s better episodes) or a number of strong turns in other movies, like Mike & Dave Need Wedding Dates.
The Big Sick is Nanjiani’s big stab at leading man status, and so he and Emily Gordon, his wife and hugely important creative collaborator, opted to adapt their real-life love story into a feature film, casting Zoe Kazan to play Emily while Kumail plays himself. And what a story it is.
At the start of The Big Sick, Kumail is a fledgling stand-up comedian in Chicago, doing the standard comedian things of hustling for time on stage while paying the bills as an Uber driver. One night, his set gets interrupted by Emily, leading to the two meeting each other proper at a bar after the show. They hit it off and hook up, after which Emily immediately insists that this be the last time they see each other. She’s a grad student with a lot going on and a romantic history that’s more…involved, let us say, than she’s willing to let on at first, and she does not have room in her life for a boyfriend. Period. She makes that very clear.
But dagnabbit, those crazy kids just can’t stay away from each other and things between them get very serious very quickly. But insecurities and secrets crop up, Kumail completely blows it, the pair breaks up and you, if you somehow managed to go into the movie without knowing the premise, may be wondering why this romantic comedy is hitting these beats so early. It’s because the real crux of the movie happens after the break-up, when Emily falls mysteriously ill and is placed in a medically induced coma (in a sequence that is truly shocking for just how unnerving Showalter plays it).
At this point, the film becomes about Kumail’s relationship with Emily’s parents, Terry (Ray Romano) and Beth (Holly Hunter). Terry is loveable and weary in that way that Ray Romano can nail in his sleep at this point, and Beth is an indomitable maternal force of nature, one who is not too thrilled that the jackass who broke her daughter’s heart is hanging around the hospital.
The Big Sick also spends a great deal of time with Kumail’s family and the cultural conflict between Kumail and his traditional Pakistani Muslim parents and their tradition of arranged marriage.
And here we begin to see the specific voice of The Big Sick that makes it the best movie of the year (so far [which it is]). The easy, Screenwriting 101 approach to these characters would be to make these characters villainous, or simply antagonistic. But Zenobia Shroff as Kumail’s mother Sharmeen and Anupam Kher (a Bollywood legend appearing in his 500TH film) as his father Azmat, are not playing villains. They are loving, complex people with well-defined points of view and reasons for why they believe the things they believe and say the things they say. For example, on the topic of arranged marriage, the movie repeatedly points out that not only Kumail’s parents but also his brother Naveed (Adeel Akhtar) are part of arranged marriages, and it has worked out splendidly. The movie has empathy for pretty much every single character who crosses the frame, taking the time to demonstrate the humanity of even the most minor and seemingly throwaway characters.
That’s always been Apatow’s magic stroke when his career shifted from being the producer of cultishly adored and quickly cancelled TV shows and became the writer-director of massive comedy blockbusters that launched a new generation of comedy talent. With movies like The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up, Apatow took stories that would not have been out of place as crazed, sex-fueled, slobs vs snobs farce in the 80s, and instead placed the emphasis on characters who are messy and damaged but are also entirely empathetic and relatable. Some characters are more immediately likable and funnier than others, but rarely is there anything approaching a traditional ‘Bad Guy’. Hell, the closest thing an Apatow movie has to a traditional, malicious villain is Adam Sandler in Funny People, and he’s the main character.
But I was pleasantly surprised to see Showalter not only playing within this field but succeeding so wildly in it. I’ll confess to ignorance surrounding Showalter’s directorial efforts not connected with his State crew, a comedy commune that emphasizes surrealism, deconstruction, and a glib (some [me] might say smug) detached tone, so maybe people who watched The Baxter or My Name is Doris knew he had this in him, but I absolutely did not.
Showalter doing such an incredible job with this romantic comedy is doubly impressive given that his earlier film, They Came Together, effectively shredded the genre into a bloody pulp. They Came Together is as perfectly executed a disemboweling of a genre as Airplane!’s takedown of disaster movies or Walk Hard’s attack on music biopics. It is that laser-accurate and that relentlessly savage. And maybe that’s why Showalter proved to be such a perfect fit for this material: He knows every cliché inside and out and as such was able to steer around them. When The Big Sick does arrive at the preordained narrative beats of this kind of story, they feel satisfying rather than predictable, earned rather than perfunctory. They arise out of honest observations of human behavior, not some screenwriter just rehashing plot points because they saw them in When Harry Met Sally a couple decades ago and just figure, ‘Hey, if it ain’t broke…’.
The Big Sick’s generous spirit also extends to the comedy, of which everyone gets to partake. I know I haven’t exactly touched on that yet, but rest assured that for however many words I devote to describing the touching/harrowing/humane nature of the film, The Big Sick is primarily a comedy and it is so fucking funny that the first time I watched it I think my heart legitimately stopped beating a couple of times, that’s how out of breath I was. And I’m grateful for the screener I got to write this review, since it gave me a chance to go back and find a bunch of jokes that I missed because I was laughing so hard.
Kumail gets one joke…I won’t even tell you what it is or what subject matter is about, but the way it’s written, the way he delivers it, and the way Showalter shoots and cuts the delivery and payoff…it’s just absolutely perfect and even after watching the film multiple times it still makes me howl like an absolute goon.
But Nanjiani and Gordon did not write a screenplay in which their alter egos spit out endless streams of quips and one-liners like a kind of later-day Nick and Nora Charles (although hell yes I would watch that). They spread the wealth to the parents, as well as comedians like Bo Burnham and Aidy Bryant. Romano may be the most…’Dad’ screen-dad in a long, long time, and it’s adorable. Hunter is just awesome, you presumably knew that already. Nanjiani’s family even gets a hilarious sequence of banter delivered entirely in Urdu.
Even as the film pushes into some truly dark places, that humor is never far from hand. The Big Sick, and its creators, understands that humor is how people cope with those moments when life is at is cruelest and hardest. Humor is what brought Kumail and Emily together, and it’s a big part of why he’s able to bond with her parents despite the fact that they are united by tragedy and also he was a real asshole to their daughter, like you wouldn’t believe.
If The Big Sick has a flaw, it’s right there in the set-up. It’s a romantic comedy where one half of the couple is unconscious and largely off-screen for a huge part of the runtime, a deficit that’s all the more pronounced by just how immediately appealing Kazan is as Emily, especially when she’s playing off Nanjiani. It leaves the film feeling oh-so slightly off-balance, especially in the third act when The Big Sick starts to show minor signs of Apatow-ian shagginess. But that’s a minor knock against what is, once more for the cheap seats, the best movie of the year.
As I mentioned at the top, The Big Sick is available to buy on Amazon now and, as an Amazon-distributed film, will most likely be on Prime in the coming months. But if physical media is your bag, the movie is well-worth getting on Blu-ray or DVD for the commentary track alone. Nanjiani, Gordon, Showalter and producer Barry Mendel engage in some of the usual commentary chit-chat and patting of each other on the back, but the commentary is also hugely informative about the process of shaping both Nanjiani and Gordon’s real life story into a coherent film, and this massive trove of footage they had into this film. The commentary also doesn’t sugar-coat the realities of filmmaking and what a frustrating and demanding process it can be, with Showalter criticizing some of his decisions in staging and editing and Nanjiani openly talking about the days when the stress of the shoot got to be too much and he became unpleasant to be around.
This kind of honesty is shocking on a commentary track, but it’s fitting for a film that is fearless in the way it depicts the ways in which love can be messy, terrifying, destructive, while also being a leap of faith that is well worth taking. The Big Sick is not a sprawling epic with jaw-dropping set-pieces, and nor is it consumed with grand pronouncements about the human condition. But in its deeply felt and wonderfully funny depiction of flawed, possibly even broken individuals slouching their way towards those connections that can, if survived, yield love and grace, The Big Sick may just end up being the most human movie of the year.
And also the best of the year. Which it is. Go see this movie, people.
Get it at Amazon:
The Big Sick — [Blu-ray] | [DVD] | [Amazon Video]