Blu-ray Review: ‘The Big Sick’ Comes Home

Romantic comedies so rarely ascend to the heights of brilliance anymore these days. While the foundation of Hollywood, indeed, of cinema, was laid by the concept of brilliant romantic comedies (City Lights, It Happened One Night, Some Like It Hot…I could go on), recent decades have been home to more fluff than genius. These days, the genre is marred by clichés and tropes, with cookie cutter scripts serving as little more than a vehicle to deliver whatever the in faces of the moment happen to be.

Genuine emotion is a rarity in many films anymore, but nowhere is this felt harder than in the romantic comedy. At the height of its form, the rom-com is a niche that can deliver laughter and tears in the same scene, reaching us deeply and touching us in ways that only cinema can accomplish. Hollywood forgets that a lot, but this absence feels especially egregious on the rom-com front.

Which is probably why The Big Sick felt so inspired when it hit theaters earlier this year. Here is a rom-com that remembers its purpose—to be a film that moves and audiences with laughter and emotion—for the first time in years. This is a film that, like all great films, transcends the trappings of its genre, becoming something more, something greater, than what it seems.

We’ve been on The Big Sick train since it first premiered earlier this year at SXSW. Co-written by real life married couple Kumail Nanjiani (who also stars) and Emily V. Gordon, the film is a somewhat-fictionalized recounting of their beginning days as a couple, when Gordon (Emily Gardner, in the film, who’s played by Zoe Kazan) was put into a medically induced coma following a serious infection. While she’s under, Kumail is forced to bond with her parents (Ray Romano and Holly Hunter) and come to terms with how dating a woman outside his Pakistani heritage may affect his family.

Now available on Blu-ray, The Big Sick is a must own for anyone’s movie collection. Nanjiani and Gordon have lovingly crafted a story that deals with the hard realities of falling in love. Oddly, it does this with very little by the way of romance. With Emily out of the picture for much of the film, The Big Sick focuses on one of those unspoken truisms about romance—sometimes finding it is as much an issue of dealing with yourself as it is finding the right person.

Nanjiani has great chemistry, not just with Kazan but with the entire cast. You very nearly forger that you’re not watching the actual couple or Gordon’s parents actually interact with Nanjiani. It’s a testament to his skills at both writing (which were honed on stage as a standup comedian) and as an actor. His scenes with Romano and Hunter oscillate quickly from tender to hilarious to dramatic, capturing perfectly the awkwardness of getting to know a new partner’s parents and providing an intriguing depth to this (semi)romantic story.

The best parts of the film, however, deal with Nanjiani’s relationship with his own family, who are eager to set him up with a nice Pakistani girl and are none-too-pleased at his burgeoning relationship with a white American woman. The Big Sick is as much a tale of love as it is a tale of overcoming expectations, cultural, familial, or otherwise.

The Blu-ray features wonderful additional content that takes you deeper into the film and the real-life story behind it. On top of a commentary track with the stars and director Michael Showalter, you also get several behind the scenes featurettes like A Personal Journey: The Making of the Big Sick, the SXSW Panel/Q&A session, and deleted scenes. There’s also a far-too-short look at the comedy tour The Bigger Sick: Stick Around for More Laughs, which features Nanjiani, producer Judd Apatow, and several comedians featured in the film performing standup while taking the film on tour.

While that could have (should have) been much longer than it is (indeed, judging just from the clips included here, this feels like its deserving of its own standup special) it’s still a wonderful addition to the home release that gives you a better idea of how close everyone involved in the film was.

Full of warmth and sweetness, The Big Sick is one of the most perfect date movies to come out in a good long while. More than just a great rom-com, it’s a great film period, one you’ll be happy to know is sitting on your shelf for whenever the occasion might arise.

The Big Sick is now available on Blu-ray.

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