The Big Sick is the best rom-com we’ve had in years

COMEDIES are so hit and miss. But this is a bona fide hit and you don’t want to be the only one in the office who didn’t see it.

ROMANTIC comedies don’t have the best reputation. Seen as belonging to the realm of “chick flicks”, they don’t always get the respect some of them deserve among the wider movie-going public.

They’re often derided for being frivolous and asinine. And they often are.

But sometimes, they’re clever films with great characters that don’t rely on tired tropes or Matthew McConaughey as some smarmy douchebag — I’m talking about the likes of When Harry Met Sally, Annie Hall or Four Weddings and a Funeral.

But it seems the movie-making factories have been steering clear of rom-coms in the last few years as action blockbusters increasingly find favour at the box office (rom-coms don’t tend to have franchise potential).

There are few great recent flicks you can genuinely call a romantic comedy — many films have romantic elements or are funny but they’re not what defines them. Trainwreck, (500) Days of Summer, Obvious Child and Crazy, Stupid, Love are probably the best examples of the past decade.

Now you can add The Big Sick to that short list.

Oozing with irresistible charm, The Big Sick is the big-screen “adaptation” of comedian Kumail Nanjiani and his wife Emily V. Gordon’s real-life story of how the two of them met.

Kumail and Emily are your new favourite couple.

More than just a boy-meets-girl tale that will lift your heart, The Big Sick is also an insightful movie about family and the expectations of migrant parents.

Produced by Judd Apatow — that great harnesser of talent — and written by Nanjiani and Gordon, the movie was directed by Michael Showalter (Wet Hot American Summer, They Came Together), starring Nanjiani as himself and Zoe Kazan as Emily with big hitters Ray Romano and Holly Hunter playing Emily’s parents.

Kumail is an aspiring stand-up comic in Chicago who drives an Uber as his day job. One night at his regular gig, a woman in the audience — Emily — heckles him. After the show he picks her up at the bar with his regular line — writing her name in Urdu on a napkin. She calls him out on it but falls for him all the same.

They start hanging out and hooking up even though neither of them wants a “relationship”. But despite themselves, they’re clearly enraptured.

Kumail’s immigrant parents (Anupam Kher and Zenobia Shroff) expect him to enter into an arranged marriage and parade a bevy of eligible Pakistani women who always happen to “drop by” during family dinners. He jokes-not-jokes that his parents call arranged marriages just “marriage”. Dating and marrying a white girl is out of the question — his cousin did that and was cast out of the family.

When Emily discovers this, she’s heartbroken, and so are you. Not long afterwards, Kumail gets a phone call from a friend of Emily’s, saying she’s been admitted to hospital with a serious infection.

Hunter and Romano are warm and funny as Emily’s parents. Roadshow Pictures.

Emily is placed into a medically induced coma while the doctors try to figure out what’s struck her down. Her parents Terry (Romano) and Beth (Hunter) come to New York and Kumail meets them for the first time under these awkward and fraught circumstances.

In just the first act, The Big Sick manages to establish an incredibly strong chemistry between this on-screen couple and the idea of them not being together forever is mortifying.

It’s an ambitious move, putting one of your romantic leads out of action for more than half the movie (While You Were Sleeping doesn’t count, the coma guy was a supporting character at best), and one The Big Sick pulls off with aplomb. Even though you don’t see Emily the whole second act, the connection between her and Kumail feels authentic and unbreakable.

A later scene in which Kumail’s stand-up gig is essentially a meltdown as he tells the audience about Emily’s condition wasn’t scripted but improvised on the day of filming. It’s raw and affecting because the emotion of that scene is what really happened to Nanjiani the actor, writer and husband.

Woven throughout the story of Emily and Kumail is the relationship between Kumail and his family and the tension between trying to make an honest life for yourself and not disappointing your parents and their expectations of you.

While that’s not something unique to migrant families, it is a conflict that’s more prevalent between first and second generations when cultures clash. The Big Sick gives us a lot of insight into the love that ties everyone together even when it would be easier to walk away.

The performances are all wonderful and the film balances the tonal shifts between comedy and near-tragedy very well.

A big hit when it debuted at Sundance this year, The Big Sick made headlines for the $12 million Amazon paid for the film’s distribution rights — one of the most expensive deals in the history of the film festival. It’s also already generating Oscar buzz with a nomination for Best Original Screenplay being touted as a possibility.

That’s all part of the obvious happy ending in store for Emily and Kumail — after all, they did write the movie — but even knowing that, The Big Sick still surprises you. You’ll laugh, you’ll tear up and you’ll root for them.

The Big Sick could save the romantic comedy.

This is the kind of rom-com anyone can get behind — even the manliest of Vin Diesel-watching men — because there’s nothing more universal than falling in love.

Rating: 4.5/5

The Big Sick is in cinemas from Thursday, August 3.

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