The real-life love story between writer-producer Emily Gordon and comic Kumail Nanjiani is truly stranger than fiction. The two met at one of Kumail's stand-up shows, dated for a couple months, and then Emily became very sick and had to be put in a medically-induced coma for over a week. It turns out she had a rare disease called adult-onset Still's disease that can cause severe infections. When Emily came out of her coma, Kumail knew he wanted to marry her--a tad difficult considering that the Pakistani comic had promised his parents he would eventually enter into an arranged marriage, as is the custom in his culture. He didn't. He and Emily married a less than a year later--only 8 months after they first met. They've been together for over a decade now.
If it sounds like the plot of a wacky romantic comedy, well, Emily and Kumail thought so too! The Big Sick, directed by Michael Showalter and starring Kumail as himself and Zoe Kazan as Emily, takes some artistic license with Emily and Kumai's love story, adding in dramatic elements like a pre-coma break-up when Emily finds a cigar box in Kumail's room containing head shots of Pakistani women that his mother sent him as potential brides. But overall, it appears to stay true to the heart of their story.
The Big Sick is absolutely adorable and both devastatingly funny and just plain devastating at times. After Emily is put into a coma to save her life, Kumail calls her parents--played wonderfully by Ray Romano and Holly Hunter. Beth (Hunter) is a 5' 2" mama bear who is very suspicious of Kumail, the man who broke her daughter's heart. Terry (Romano) is a bit more open-minded and impressed that Kumail is sincere in his desire to hang out at the hospital everyday, waiting for updates on Emily's condition.
By the nature of the plot, The Big Sick really is more Kumail's story than Emily's, since she's asleep for 50% of it. The film explores his fraught relationship with his parents who fully expect Kumail to marry a woman chosen by them. They are devout Muslims and Kumail humors them by pretending to pray even though he's not a believer. To make things more complicated, Kumail's older brother did enter into an arranged marriage and, for all intents and purposes, chose the life his parents expected him to choose. Kumail's wildly different path--trying to make it in the cutthroat world of comedy and falling in love with a white woman--challenges the rest of his family's choices on a deep level. But, as he points out in a climatic scene, they left Pakistan to raise him in America. Can they really blame him for embracing American life fully?
That The Big Sick is about an interracial couple, yet avoids eroticizing and politicizing that aspect, is pretty amazing. The fact that Kumail is Pakistani and Emily is white does come up over the course of the film, mostly during conversations between Kumail and his brother and parents about their expectation he marry within their culture, but there is an absolutely remarkable lack of hostile racism from anyone in the film, white or brown. There is the scene where Terry asks what Kumail's "opinion" of 9/11 is and Kumail deadpans "9/11. Well, it was a tragedy. We lost 19 of our best guys." (a conversation that apparently didn't actually happen). But overall, Emily's parents take it in stride that their daughter is dating a brown man. I don't know if Emily and Kumail's real-life relationship was so free of racial hostility (somehow, I doubt it), but it was really cool to see a movie where the fact that the leads have different color skin isn't their biggest obstacle (at least, I thought it was cool. Others might disagree).
Overall, I loved The Big Sick. It's a big-hearted movie for the small-hearted world we live in right now. And the fact that it's based in reality makes it even sweeter because it's even less of a fairytale. As much as I like movies that are massively fucked up and depressing, I also like being reminded that real love and commitment actually do exist and can overcome a myriad of obstacles.
Grade: B+
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