Director Michael Showalter and rising star Kumail Nanjiani, after kicking in the door and breaking new ground for rom-coms with The Big Sick, have collaborated once again. Only the results here are a lot more… regular than their innovative prior. It’s a Date Night-style affair, where Nanjiani and Issa Rae are in a struggling relationship that gets rekindled over the course of a blisteringly weird and violent night. While the step-down is a little disappointing, I’d argue that all hands being able to work this well with the material is still cause for a recommendation.
Showalter brings ability right out of the gate with the casting: If you’re gonna make a whole story about two people falling back in love with each other, it’s best to make us care about the people involved. From end to end, Rae and Nanjiani’s fonts of personality never run dry, whether they’re bickering about whether they’d make it through The Amazing Race (a bizarre bit of foreshadowing for just what their night will entail, and I’ll admit that I didn’t pick up on it right away, so the writers must’ve gotten something right), or remarking on how much it hurts to get kicked in the chest by a horse.
Yeah, set piece wise, this is pretty solid, going all the way from a case of accidental accessories to a murder, right up to Eyes Wide Shut as directed by Edgar Wright. A lot of it is couched in the ethnicity of the leads, resulting in a fair bit of race commentary that is probably funnier than it should be (them sighing with relief that they pass by a cop who is “just” a racist had me in stitches, I can’t lie), and yet runs into a development that, without entirely spoiling it, actually ends up separating this from the likes of Date Night as far as the general ‘unlikely suspects solving the crime themselves’ framework. It features quite a few cracked-out moments, and yet the plot never feels like it’s derailed at any point by those developments or, more surprisingly, by the quips made by Rae and Nanjiani. Another good example of the plot being boosted by the comedy and not the other way around.
Same goes for the inclusion of Mahdi Cocci as Keith, which allows Nanjiani and Showalter’s shared history in stand-up to shine through about how tacky it is to rip-off another comedian’s jokes. I know I fixated a little too much on such things in my Big Sick review, but again, I appreciate the tip of the hat.
With how high the hit ratio is for the quipping, the absurdist way it deals with topics like political corruption and benefit-of-the-doubt as influenced by race, and how magnetic the lead performances are, this is a rom-com that escapes the label of ‘same old, same old’ through sheer talent and some surprisingly nimble writing that breathes a few gasps of new life into the routine.
No comments:
Post a Comment