The Big Sick is a movie about a struggling comedian from a Pakistani family and his graduate-student waif of a girlfriend. They break up. She gets a mysterious infection and is put in a medically induced coma. He must deal with her parents, who are angry with him for the way he treated her, and his own parents, who are angry that he won’t accept a Pakistani girl of their choosing.
The Big Sick is nice. There are some good lines. The scenes with the Pakistani family are charming. Ray Romano is sweetly hangdog as the girl’s dad. Zoe Kazan plays Romano’s daughter, and she’s as lovely here as she was in Ruby Sparks, the distressingly overlooked movie she also wrote in 2012. Her character’s name is Emily, which is also the name of the movie’s co-screenwriter. Emily Gordon wrote the picture with her husband, Kumail Nanjiani. He is the star of The Big Sick, in which he plays a character named Kumail Nanjiani. The movie is a comic account of their courtship and her illness.
The fact that this is a true story and that the movie’s second half is about the difficulties posed by the interfaith relationship at its center adds a measure of spice to the proceedings. But only a measure. I was deeply disappointed by The Big Sick, and not so much because of the movie itself but because of the hype surrounding it. It is a very slight thing, and it has been made out to be so much more, largely due to its real-life origins and the fact that it centers on an immigrant Muslim family.
Since January, when it debuted at the Sundance Film Festival, movie critics and bloggers and the entire community of Internet pop-culture publicists had been telling me how wonderful it was—a new-millennium blend of Nora Ephron and Woody Allen. The initial notices out of Sundance were glowing: “By turns romantic, rueful, and hilarious,” panted Variety. “The best romantic comedy in years,” said RogerEbert.com. “Effortlessly funny and charming romance that subtly deepens into a moving portrait of cross-cultural, cross-generational bonds,” announced the Los Angeles Times. Amazon Studios paid $12 million for the rights.
It would be difficult for any movie to live up to such advance praise, though occasionally something does (La La Land did). Moreover, buzz out of Sundance regarding a heartwarming slice-of-life picture is usually a warning sign, not a cause for excitement and anticipation. For every Little Miss Sunshine, which took the festival by storm and then the country as well, there are five The Spitfire Grills (a movie whose very name triggers post-traumatic stress disorder even though I saw it two decades ago).
To be sure, The Big Sick is leagues superior to The Spitfire Grill, but it doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as Little Miss Sunshine. And as a portrait of the world of the ambitious up-and-coming comic, it doesn’t hold a candle to its producer Judd Apatow’s own Funny People or last year’s terrific Don’t Think Twice. It isn’t even as interesting as the HBO show Apatow is currently producing on exactly the same subject—Crashing, with Pete Holmes. And you don’t have to go to a theater to watch Crashing.
The central flaw in The Big Sick is that Nanjiani doesn’t hold the screen at all. He occasionally displays the off-kilter comic timing he uses to great effect on HBO’s Silicon Valley, but he’s a mild and recessive presence. When Emily haltingly tells him she’s “overwhelmed” by him—she’s too afraid to say she loves him—the line falls flat because Nanjiani is anything but overwhelming. When he and Kazan are on screen together, she blows him out of the water because she’s so vivid and alive and he’s just not.
So now that I’ve talked The Big Sick down, maybe you should go see it. Don’t look at its ridiculous 97 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. This is a movie that with fewer jokes and no 9/11 references could have been a Hallmark Hall of Fame special in 1984. Those were watchable. So is this. It’s even decent. It’s just not that great, and everybody who told me it was and got my hopes up should be forced to watch The Spitfire Grill again as penance.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard’s movie critic.
