“As a genre, the romantic comedy has been on its last legs lately. But an otherwise endangered form gets a welcome kick in the pants in The Big Sick, an exhilarating, utterly endearing movie that feels like both a return to classic principles and a bracing look forward.
Kumail Nanjiani, best known for his work on the HBO series Silicon Valley, stars in The Big Sick as Kumail, a Pakistani American stand-up comedian who works as an Uber driver on the side while he works out his routine in a Chicago club. When he’s heckled one night by a bright, blond graduate student named Emily (Zoe Kazan, Meek’s Cutoff, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee), the encounter leads to a funny, instant-karma one-night-stand. But what Kumail and Emily intend to be just one of those things eventually morphs into something more serious, a development that threatens Kumail’s relationship with his traditionalist parents, who are trying to fix him up with a suitable Muslim wife.
Nanjiani wrote The Big Sick with his real-life wife, Emily V. Gordon, whose serious illness, depicted on-screen, introduces yet one more complication into the already fraught culture clash of the story. Loosely based on the couple’s courtship and early romance, the movie moves easily between a seemingly endless series of false starts and setbacks, which never feel forced or plot-driven, but simply a reflection of the dizzyingly overdetermined experience otherwise known as Life. Kumail and Emily’s near instant recognition of each other as bright, slightly sarcastic observers of life feels just as organic and true as Kumail’s competitive banter with his fellow stand-up strivers (Bo Burnham, Aidy Bryant, Kurt Braunohler), which feels just as on-point as his dissembling with his mother and father (Zenobia Shroff and Anupam Kher) and the awkward first impression he makes with Emily’s parents, played with dazed concern and brittle rage by Ray Romano and Holly Hunter.
Aided by producers Judd Apatow and Barry Mendel, as well as director Michael Showalter, they succeed brilliantly with The Big Sick, which pays homage to the bless-this-mess reality of life while offering just the right fizz of romantic idealism. This alternately hilarious and wrenching portrayal of commitment threads a whisper-thin needle between candor and cathartic laughs, gliding from grim hospital vigils one minute and into antic screwball family dynamics the next. Anchored by Nanjiani’s superbly calibrated performance—not to mention his and Gordon’s scrupulous massaging of their own lived experience—The Big Sick winds up being one of the most satisfying films of the summer, and quite possibly the year.” (Ann Hornaday, Washington Post)
“It is funny and smart and wise and silly, it is romantic and sweet and just cynical enough, and it is without a doubt one of the best romantic comedies I have seen in a long time.” (Richard Roeper, Chicago Sun-Times)
“I fell hard for both Ms. Kazan and Mr. Nanjiani and The Big Sick, which tells a great story with waves of deep feeling and questions of identity and makes the whole thing feel like a breeze.” (Manohla Dargis, The New York Times)