The Big Sick (2017, Michael Showalter) (Patreon)

48/100

Bailed on this three years ago, but it placed highly enough in year-end critics' polls that I felt obligated to give it a second, complete look*. Was also conscious of not having gotten to the basic premise last time around—40 minutes into this two-hour movie, Emily is still perfectly healthy (apart from a mildly swollen ankle), and we have yet to meet her parents. I did, however, see the big break-up scene, and its melodramatic phoniness was instrumental in my decision to abandon ship shortly thereafter. Everything's exaggerated here to exactly the wrong degree, at once too broad to feel realistic and not heightened enough to actually be funny; the nadir sees Kumail blow his shot at the Montreal comedy festival not by skipping his set to be at Emily's side (cheesy but credible), or by injecting some raw emotion into his act (schematic but potentially powerful), but by standing at the microphone and literally not telling any jokes—just delivering a straightfaced monologue about how scared he is that Emily might die. We don't actually see much of this, thankfully (it mostly exists so that Emily can watch it on YouTube after she recovers), but it's emblematic of the ways in which Nanjiani and Gordon cheapen their own story in an effort to make it widely accessible. Which worked, I suppose, but blech. Things do improve once Hunter and Romano show up, but even those relationships feel sitcom-strained, with Beth in particular shifting from rancor to affection on a dime. Only when Emily awakens does the film briefly get interesting to me, as there's something arrestingly thorny about a man who expects to be rewarded by a woman for the kindness that he demonstrated toward her while she was unconscious. (The "bag of devotion" bit is appropriately mortifying.) Had Nanjiani and Gordon fully fictionalized their history, exploring the emotional turbulence of parents who fall in love with an ex-boyfriend their daughter still despises (and perhaps ironically try to "arrange" a reconciliation), they might really have had something. Instead, we get D-FENS Lite screaming at a drive-thru clerk who won't take his custom order and such yeah-okay-sure exchanges as

Emily: I never knew that Pakistan had the world's largest irrigation system.

Kumail [earnestly, not sarcastically]: Yeah, something like 14 million hectares are being irrigated. Like, soon as I read that, I was like "Oh, that's going in the show."

Emily: Totally! 

* Ordinarily this due-diligence exercise takes place prior to Skandies voting, not several years later. But the 2017 Voice poll was published ridiculously late—might even have been after the Skandies deadline. (It was definitely post-Sundance, because Bilge Ebiri, who was then the Voice's chief film critic, was sharing my condo and I remember him complaining at the time that it was out of his hands.) You'll also be seeing me finally get around to watching I, Tonya; The Disaster Artist (plus The Room—a potential 0/100!); Beatriz at Dinner; and at least the first third of Wind River at some point in the near future, just because I want to cross them off my to-do list. Same deal with the old NYFF titles—Camille Rewinds, My Name Is Hmmm...—that I've seen of late. Gonna keep working this stuff into the rotation, so that it's not all classics all the time.