The Big Sick revives the Rom-Com genre
A movie reworking an ethnic stand-up comic’s routines isn’t new. Neither is a film about an ill girlfriend in a critical care ward. However, in The Big Sick, with a script by Kumail Nanjani and his real-life sick girlfriend, Emily V. Gordon, the onscreen charisma of Nanjani and his “playing Emily” costar Zoe Kazan, and crisp direction by Michael Showalter, everything clicks. The story is about a Pakistani-born comic who meets the aforementioned girlfriend at one of his Chicago gigs, falls for her hook, line and sinker, but can’t muster the courage to tell his traditional matchmaking parents about Emily. She gets mad and leaves, and then ends up hooked to the machines in intensive care that go PING. Both sets of parents have aspirations for their grown-up kids, and Anapum Kher and Zenobia Shroff and Ray Romano and Holly Hunter play these parents to perfection. Laid out in linear fashion, the plot doesn’t seem to have many places for laughs, but in the hands of these masters, it’s a rom-com filled with humor, laughter (and a few tears), and well worth your time and money.