The Big Sick
Crit
Damn, I do love me a pic that can make me laugh and cry, sometimes simultaneously. And nowadays, I do love a pic that embraces the difference of a foreign culture while making it clear that that culture is a threat only to those in it, and people who get close.
The threat here is posed by Pakistani arranged marriage, and to a lesser extent by Islam as a manifestly apolitical force. Kumail (Kumail Nanjiani) has no interest in either, and wonders why his parents brought him to America if they didn't want him to be an American male. He and Emily (Zoe Kazan)] fall in love without his having resolved this issue (or given her any hint of it), and then things get really weird (see movie title spoiler).
Lots of chances to go clichéd here (and I understand that there have been some complaints that screenwriters Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon [his wife; yes, this is largely autobiographical] fall into that trap in its portrayal of South Asian women, an issue I'll let others who are better attuned hash out), but there was never a time when I didn't find the film unique and human, with all the messiness that entails. Wait, I take that back: there was exactly one moment that came across as a cheap and obvious narrative trick (find it for yourself). So it's not perfect.
This has to be classified as a romantic comedy, I guess, in which case Kazan has now starred in 2 of my favorite wildly unconventional romcoms, the other being the excruciatingly dark Ruby Sparks.
Trailers
- The Glass Castle--Fathers and daughters and issues, again.
- A Bad Moms Christmas--Um, probably no.
- Home Again--Reese Witherspoon as cougar? Too soon!
- The Only Living Boy in New York--If memory serves, the song titled thus immediately followed "Baby Driver" on Bridge over Troubled Water, and now the movie will follow that one into the theaters.
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