Collateral attractions: Zoe Kazan and The Big Sick [spoilers]

At first I wasn’t going to see this because it was being sold as a rom-com, a genre I generally don’t enjoy. And then I saw a clip from a scene in it on a late night talk show and laughed so hard I woke up dad on the couch, and so planned to see it. And then I got the sense from RL South Asian female friends that they were neutral to negative about it, so I was going to wait till it came on television. And then I had the very strong feeling today that I needed to get away from my computer screen and the news cycle, and it was $5 day at the cinema. So I went. The film was really perfectly cast, full of non-stop great performances, from the supporting cast as well as the leads. But still, and as so often, I had mixed feelings, leaning toward the positive. I liked it more than I didn’t like it, which is why I’m bothering with a review.

The “based on real life” plot: A Pakistani American comic, Kumail Nanjiani (played by himself) is busy developing his standup comedy audience, watching youtube vids when he should be saying his five-times daily prayers, and avoiding the arranged marriage with a Pakistani woman that his family is planning for him. He meets Emily (Zoe Kazan) when she heckles him during his standup routine, and that very night, he begins to fall for her. Although their persona and sexual attraction is instant and potent, both have emotional reservations. Kumail tries to play it both ways with predictable results. When a catastrophe occurs that brings Emily’s parents to town, he’s forced to confront his lies to Emily, his parents, and most of all, to himself, not just about marriage, but also about his life in general. In the end, so the implication of the film, all’s well that ends well. This kind of film demands the ending it got. The real life happy ending of Nanjiani’s relationship with his wife, Emily V. Gordon, happened with even greater velocity. So I am factoring that piece out as a result of genre and not really worthy of discussion. Would these two really be a good match? Wasn’t Kumail in the film just marrying his strong-willed mother? And mother-in-law?

Full disclosure: I had a similar conflict with my parents. Not over marriage (the axis Nanjiani wrote about) but over religion (it’s also mentioned briefly in the film that Islam is part of the baggage that Kumail is conflicted about). Long term readers know that my parents are/were devout members of a conservative Lutheran sect, and that I converted to Judaism. I also hid this decision from my parents for a time, and weaseled out of potential revealing situations, and then finally told them, whereupon ensued a lengthy, wounded, punishing silence from their side. So the scene where Kumail confronts his parents at the dinner table after the truth comes out was extremely poignant to me; it was a funny version of a conversation I also enacted, and I saw my family in the scene near the end with Kumail’s parents in the car as well. I don’t have any difficulty understanding his motivation or his strategy — I spent a year and two summers avoiding weekends at home when the Eucharist was being offered in church. I “came out” at the point at which it was impossible to stay hidden any longer.

In the end, I reacted to the film mainly through the prisms of (a) being a woman and (b) my own experiences of what happens when an irresolvable conflict over family identity arises and (c) my political commitments.

On the first issue (women) — I was really worried after the first part that Emily was playing a manic pixie dream girl, something I’ve had no time for since its eruption in the late 1990s. The chief features of the MPDG are some kind of obvious signification of girlishness as opposed to womanhood (in Emily’s case, the big eyes, the shy smile, and the frailty); a quirky personality; weird problems that paradoxically make her more rather than less attractive; and the narrative function of allowing the (usually depressed) male who falls in life with her to develop more fully as a mature being. Note that Zoe Kazan is on record as finding this expression misogynist; I’d assert against this statement that it’s not the expression that’s misogynist, it’s the type, which recurs frequently and is a construction of the male gaze. Arguably, Emily in The Big Sick has all these features. She’s saved by a hair in that she actually asserts herself and refuses to let Kumail take advantage of her when she realizes what’s going on — and because we often see her not looking her best. However, I didn’t understand why Kumail fell in love with her. But in the world of the MPDG–troubled man romance, such things are not typically explained. The film instrumentalizes the character of Emily as the tool of Kumail’s growth, but I ended up deciding it didn’t matter as it didn’t interfere with what I took to be the main concerns of the film. In other words, I ended up not thinking the film was a rom-com, so I cared less about the romantic aspect of it.

On the second issue (family conflict) — I thought this was the strongest part of the film, and done really accurately, if not always sensitively. It is a comedy, after all, and it’s written from Kumail’s perspective, and despite his attempt to keep serious matters light — “always with the comedy” — he is obdurate, first passively, then actively, that he will not allow his parents to select his partner. I think this is a type of conflict that is particularly frequent in immigrant family constellations, but it’s not unusual outside of them, either, and it’s what gives the picture its universal appeal. Parents sacrifice for their children, often at great cost, and then the children grow up to be, well, who they are and not what their parents had dreamed. I also find this particular means of resisting expectation (going along but not saying anything until there’s no choice) to be a characteristic of many men I have met over the years. The Big Sick portrays both of these things in a Pakistani American mood, which is more charming than exoticizing. The Nanjianis seem like a typical American family, something that Kumail tries to question humorously in the introduction to his one-man show, but which is nonetheless true. In the end, the film doesn’t construct the Nanjianis as tyrannical or ridiculous, which stories written by children sometimes do — Kumail takes their concerns seriously and the film presents them sympathetically. It’s clear that Kumail loves his parents. He just can’t be other than he is and they can’t be other than they are and somehow they have to reconstruct their relationship past that insoluble conflict.

Which leads me to the third issue, which is about the question of stereotype and balance and my politics. I do think there’s potentially an issue when a white US viewer (me) laughs at in-group stereotypes about ethnic minorities. Particularly these days, it’s not easy to be a Pakistani American speaking publicly and this film points that out pretty clearly. There were jokes that I laughed at and then thought, wait, should I be laughing at this? And there was also at least one point where I thought, I didn’t understand that but I bet it’s an in-group joke. (I can’t remember the moment but it was early in the film.) Moreover, I can see why a Pakistani or Pakistani American woman might roll her eyes at this film, especially if she were herself looking for a traditional marriage.I’m familiar with a parallel impatience in some Jewish circles about Jewish men who complain that they can’t find women but refuse to date Jewish ones, and in some hyper-conservative Christian circle as well. The film isn’t willing to consider a match-made marriage for Kumail as a reasonable possibility for even a second, because Kumail the character and Nanjiani the person rejected it, and as someone who grew up expecting to choose my own mate, I have a built-in predilection to sympathize with him that is unfair to the other side of the question. Nonetheless, I wouldn’t argue as harshly in these directions as Hadley Freeman has, for two reasons.

One is that I think she exaggerates the extent to which the film denigrates the Pakistani women that we see Kumail meet. I thought these scenes were superfluous and a little mean, insofar as that, even apart from the question of race/ethnicity, I find it uncool to laugh at the person who is making herself vulnerable and at least trying, particularly from the perspective of the person who’s rejecting them. These women are better people than Kumail, not because they’re following the rules or making their mothers happy, but because they engage with a situation that Kumail interacts with only as a refusenik. At least two of the “prospective brides” come off really well, and the first one, who doesn’t, seems to have been chosen as a candidate specifically due to her capacity to accommodate Kumail’s X-Files love and general nerdiness. Even if he apparently doesn’t care whether his partner shares his interests, as Emily’s rejection of his taste in movies is clearly no obstacle, this is a loving act from his mother, who isn’t just throwing random women at him. None of the women are obviously unsuitable, and the one who seems most suitable in temperament, Khadija (Vella Lovell, who I guess is not of Pakistani descent), turns out to have hated the episodes she saw of X-Files. It’s an open question to me how Kumail feels about the women who are “dropping by” for dinner with his family — as he doesn’t actually look in detail at any of them. He doesn’t fail to respect them so much as he ignores them. And to me the regular deposit of photos in a cigar box was a sign of conflictedness more than of condescension. The film shows that Khadija, who is willing, is as exhausted by the whole thing as Kumail, who is not. As the film hints, her son’s failure to respond to any overtures may also be an increasing embarrassment to Mrs. Nanjiani — but again, at least she’s trying, and also worn down by the situation despite her rock-hard determination to find her son a wife.

The second, and potentially more important one for me, is that the biggest victim of Kumail’s inability to confront his family, or himself, is Kumail. Khadija is “in demand” and I assume the other women would be as well. Kumail’s parents and brother and sister-in-law are married to their satisfaction. Emily seems perfectly prepared to live her life on her own. The one who’s really unhappy and stranded in the film is Kumail. The Big Sick also makes this amply clear. Emily’s most important function for him isn’t that she serves as love object, it’s that she gives him the necessary kick in the ass to grow up already. Which is why the character runs a lot of danger of stepping into MPDG territory — until we consider that the film isn’t much of a romance.

Two of our fellow fans have reviewed the film, both more enthusiastically than I have: SueBC and Knightleyemma. Check out what they had to say!

~ by Servetus on August 2, 2017.