The Big Sick

You’ll like­ly recog­nise Kumail Nanjiani’s face, if not his name: with cred­its on every­thing from Sex Tape to Broad City, the heavy-browed, Karachi-born sup­port­ing play­er has become increas­ing­ly promi­nent among that reper­to­ry of odd­balls lend­ing added val­ue to the decade’s comedic endeavours.

The Big Sick – direct­ed by Michael Showal­ter, and pro­duced by 21^st cen­tu­ry mogul of mirth Judd Apa­tow – feels like the kind of project designed to intro­duce a wider audi­ence to a per­former beloved among their peers but only fleet­ing­ly glimpsed else­where: a mul­ti­plex-ready rom-com, co-authored by Nan­jiani with wife Emi­ly Gor­don, and based on the pair’s uncon­ven­tion­al courtship.

Apatow’s influ­ence is imme­di­ate­ly felt: a com­e­dy-cir­cuit milieu (here Chica­go, suc­ceed­ing Fun­ny Peo­ple​’s LA) is evoked in loose, relaxed, at least semi-impro­vised scenes, feed­ing into a gen­er­ous two-hour run­ning time. Set­tle in, though, and mat­ters get a shade more cul­tur­al­ly spe­cif­ic – a refine­ment of the dis­as­trous fringe show the film’s Kumail con­ceives by way of explain­ing his Pak­istani her­itage to crowds of watch-check­ing WASPs.

His mate­r­i­al? Reli­gion (a non-prac­tis­ing Mus­lim, he spends prayer time turned towards YouTube), crick­et field­ing posi­tions and arranged mar­riages, the lat­ter pro­vid­ing a real-life stum­bling block once he falls for white girl Emi­ly (Zoe Kazan). For a while, this romance pro­ceeds accord­ing to the tem­plate of Apatow’s Net­flix cre­ation Love. Showalter’s lovers meet very cute (she’s a heck­ler), then begin to work through yet more of mod­ern dating’s myr­i­ad complications.

Emily’s white­ness, how­ev­er, isn’t the real issue here; it’s her grow­ing pal­lor. Kazan pays Gor­don the com­pli­ment of play­ing movie Emi­ly as an eva­sive­ly inde­pen­dent, flesh-and-blood woman, not just a stooge recruit­ed to laugh at her co-star’s jokes – and the unusu­al­ly height­ened stakes under­pin­ning this rela­tion­ship are revealed after she’s rushed to hos­pi­tal with a rare, life-threat­en­ing disease.

There­after, the film recon­fig­ures itself into a wait­ing game, dur­ing which Nan­jiani – to his cred­it – keeps test­ing him­self as writer and actor: Kumail with­holds his true feel­ings from his tra­di­tion­al­ist par­ents (Bol­ly­wood vet­er­ans Anu­pam Kher and Zeno­bia Shroff) while plead­ing his case, in the ICU ward, before the whol­ly cher­ish­able pair­ing of Hol­ly Hunter and Ray Romano as Emily’s folks. What begins as mere­ly anoth­er romance morphs into an inver­sion of arranged mar­riage: our young swain is con­front­ed by his beloved’s par­ents before he’s had chance to con­nect with their o spring, and as awk­ward­ness cedes to mutu­al affec­tion, he proves him­self a wor­thy suitor.

You’d still call it a decent rather than mould-break­ing film, ham­strung by the cosi­ness that fol­lows from know­ing Emi­ly will sur­vive to claim her co-writer cred­it; the sec­ond hour, indeed, has so much nar­ra­tive to resolve that it often for­gets to be fun­ny. Nev­er­the­less, the sweet­ness radi­at­ing out­wards from Nan­jiani sus­tains it, and when­ev­er The Big Sick digs a sub­stra­tum or two deep­er than the rom-com norm, that spit­balling Apa­tow house style starts to resem­ble some­thing like pro­fun­di­ty: an ana­logue for the ways in which most of us mud­dle through this change­able world, try­ing to make light of life’s trick­i­er moments, hope­ful every­thing will turn out for the best.