It’s hard to make working the Chicago standup circuit into an original story nowadays; Tina Fey and Scott Adsit have talked it up enough for the next century or so. Almost every aspiring comedian winds their way into the Windy City, and thus every successful one has roughly the same story as to how they escaped the improv cult to land a Netflix special and make six figures at 30.
But not Kumail Nanjiani.
2017’s The Big Sick follows Kumail (playing himself), a struggling stand-up comic who consistently disappoints his Pakistani parents (Anupam Kher and Zenobia Shroff) with both his career choice and resistance to arranged marriage. While his path as a comedian could have a positive end at the Montreal Comedy Festival, his dating life takes an unexpected turn when he meets Emily (Zoe Kazan)…a white girl.
From there, the plot progression seems pretty clear cut: they’ll get together, it’ll disappoint his parents, they’ll split, his parents will cave, they’ll get back together and live happily ever after.
But The Big Sick is aptly titled: still unbeknownst to his family, Kumail and Emily split – and she falls gravely ill. Called to the hospital as the only available contact, Kumail is informed that his ex needs to be put in a medically-induced coma. Only her family can sign the consent forms, and the presiding doctor asks Kumail several times, pen in hand:
“Are you her husband?”
When Emily’s parents – Terry and Beth (Ray Romano and Holly Hunter) – arrive, Kumail is surprised to find they already know all about him – and they aren’t thrilled. Asked to leave, he instead chooses to stick around until Emily wakes up. That is, if she wakes up.
With a little elbow grease, Kumail opens a dialogue with Emily’s parents, only to discover that, even in their middle class American family, love is not as straightforward as it might seem. They share with him tales of their past before and after Emily; it turns out Terry (an Italian from New York) was initially spurned by Beth’s North Carolina family. Even after they “got used to him,” their marriage was not perfect, as Terry reveals after an argument with Beth leaves him on an air mattress at Kumail’s place.
All the while, Kumail is still performing standup in an attempt to advance his career. How do you muster the courage to tell jokes – especially when the stakes are high – while the girl you love is comatose and your family is threatening to disown you?
It’s rare that a romantic comedy can run so deeply: it crosses cultural boundaries, tackles grief and loss, and still remains unequivocally hilarious. Writers Kumail and Emily V. Gordon perform a great feat in maintaining the “comedy” aspect of this film when so much is at risk.
No simple task is drawing parallels between the trials of a Pakistani immigrant family and middle-class white folks, either. This film does an incredibly subtle job of leveling the playing field between the two groups, proving that every family dynamic has its squeaky wheels. After all, as Kumail tells Emily:
“I’m fighting a 4,000-year-old culture, and you were ugly in high school!”
It’s easy to marginalize other people’s problems, and it cuts deep when they’re the people you love. Another quote from Terry brings it all back home:
“Love isn’t easy. That’s why they call it love.”
The Big Sick speaks to many facets of life at once in a whirlwind of emotion and laughter, making you wonder if one will ever outshine the other. Grief and loss have never before been so deeply intertwined with hilarity and charm, resulting in a colorful romance unique to the genre.