Emily V. Gordon – Memphis Flyer

In America, it was the worst of times, but inside the multiplex, it was the best of times. Mega-blockbusters faltered, while an exceptional crop of small films excelled. There was never a week when there wasn’t something good playing on Memphis’ big screens. Here’s the Flyer‘s film awards for 2017.

Worst Picture: Transformers: The Last Knight
There was a crap-flood of big budget failures in 2017. The Mummy was horrifying in the worst way. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales sank the franchise. There was an Emoji Movie for some reason. What set Michael Bay’s nadir apart from the “competition” was its sneering contempt for the audience. I felt insulted by this movie. Everyone involved needs to take a step back and think about their lives.

Zeitgiestiest: Ingrid Goes West
In the first few years of the decade, our inner worlds were reshaped by social media. In 2017, social media reshaped the real world. No film better understood this crucial dynamic, and Aubrey Plaza’s ferociously precise performance as an Instagram stalker elevates it to true greatness.

Most Recursive: The Disaster Artist
James Franco’s passion project is a great film about an awful film. He is an actor dismissed as a lightweight doing a deep job directing a film about the worst director ever. He does a great job acting as a legendarily bad actor. We should be laughing at the whole thing, but somehow we end up crying at the end. It’s awesome.

Overlooked Gem: Blade Runner 2049
How does a long-awaited sequel to one of the greatest sci-fi films of all time, directed by one of the decade’s best directors, co-starring a legendary leading man and the hottest star of the day, end up falling through the cracks? Beats me, but if you like Dennis Villaneuve, Harrison Ford, Ryan Gosling, smart scripts, and incredible cinematography, and you didn’t see this film, rectify your error

Best Scene: Wonder Woman in No Man’s Land
The most successful superhero movie of the year was Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman. Midway through the picture, our hero leads a company of soldiers across a muddy World War I battlefield. Assailed on every side by machine gun fire and explosions, Wonder Woman presses on, never wavering, never doubting, showing the fighting men what real inner strength looks like. In this moment, Gal Gadot became a hero to millions of girls.

Best Memphis Movie: Good Grief
Melissa Anderson Sweazy and Laura Jean Hocking’s documentary Good Grief rose above a highly competitive, seven-film Hometowner slate at Indie Memphis to sweep the feature awards. It is a delicate, touching portrait of a summer camp for children who have lost loved ones due to tragedy. Full disclosure: I’m married to one of the directors. Fuller disclosure: I didn’t have a damn thing to do with the success of this film.

MVP: Adam Driver
Anyone with eyes could see former Girls co-star Adam Driver was a great actor, but he came into his own in 2017 with a trio of perfect performances. First, he lost 50 pounds and went on a seven-day silent prayer vigil to portray a Jesuit missionary in Martin Scorsese’s Silence. Then he was Clyde Logan, the one-armed Iraq vet who helps his brother and sister rob the Charlotte Motor Speedway in Stephen Soderberg’s Logan Lucky. Finally, he was Kylo Ren, the conflicted villain who made Star Wars: The Last Jedi the year’s best blockbuster.

Best Editing: Baby Driver
Edgar Wright’s heist picture is equal parts Bullitt and La La Land. In setting some of the most spectacular car chases ever filmed to a mixtape of sleeper pop hits from across the decades, Wright and editor Jonathan Amos created the greatest long-form music video since “Thriller.”

Best Screenplay: The Big Sick
Screenwriter Emily V. Gordon, and comedian Kumail Nanjiani turned the story of their unlikely (and almost tragic) courtship into the year’s best and most humane comedy.

Best Performance By A Nonhuman: Sylvio Bernardi, Sylvio
In this hotly contested category, 2014 winner Caesar, the ape commander of War For The Planet Of The Apes, was narrowly defeated by a simian upstart. Sylvio, co-directed by Memphian Kentucker Audley, is a low-key comedy about a mute monkey in sunglasses (played by co-director Albert Binny) who struggles to keep his dignity intact while breaking into the cutthroat world of cable access television. Sylvio speaks to every time you’ve felt like an awkward outsider.

Best Performance (Honorable Mention): Kyle MacLachlan, Twin Peaks: The Return
David Lynch referred to his magnum opus as an 18-hour film, but Twin Peaks is a TV series to its core. The Return may be the crowning achievement of the current second golden age of television, but without MacLachlan’s beyond brilliant performance, Lynch’s take-no-prisoners surrealism would fly apart. I struggle to think of any precedent for MacLachlan’s achievement, playing at least four different versions of Special Agent Dale Cooper, whose identity gets fractured across dimensions as he tries to escape the clutches of the Black Lodge.

Best Performance: Francis McDormand, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Sometimes the best film performers are the ones who do the least, and no one does nothing better than Francis McDormand. As the mother of a murdered daughter seeking the justice in the court of public opinion she was denied in the court of law, McDormand stuffs her emotions way down inside, so a clenched jaw or raised eyebrow lands harder than the most impassioned speech.

Best Director: Greta Gerwig, Lady Bird
Lady Bird is destined to be a sentimental, coming-of-age classic for a generation of women. But it is not itself excessively sentimental. Greta Gerwig and star Saoirse Ronan are clear-eyed about their heroine’s failings and delusions as she navigates the treacherous psychic waters of high school senior year. Gerwig, known until now primarily as an actor, wrote and directed this remarkably insightful film that is as close to perfection as anything on the big screen in 2017.

Best Picture: Get Out — In prepping for my year-end list, I re-read my review for Get Out, which was positive but not gushing. Yet I have thought about this small, smart film from comedian Jordan Peele more than any other 2017 work. Peele took the conventions of horror films and shaped them into a deeply reasoned treatise on the insidious evil of white supremacy. Sometimes, being alive in 2017 seemed like living in The Sunken Place, and Peele’s film seems like a message from a saner time.

Autobiography is traditionally the realm of the writer, not the filmmaker. Maybe that’s because it’s a lot easier to sit down and write the story of your life than it is to hire a film crew and play yourself doing the things you did in real life. You’ll also be much more successful at conveying to the audience the subjective experience of being you in written form than you would be by trying to recreate real-life events in front of a camera. No matter how much time and money you spend, it’s just never going to look the same, if for no other reason than the fact you’ll be older the second time around.

These difficulties are part of what make the success of The Big Sick so remarkable. It’s the true story of how the two screenwriters, Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon, met and fell in love. What raises the difficulty level significantly is that Nanjiani plays himself.

Documentarians such as Agnès Varda and Ross McElwee have used the medium of film to paint sometimes unflattering portraits of themselves. Memphis filmmaker Kentucker Audley made two intimately autobiographical films: the coming of age story Open Five, and Open Five 2, which was about the personal repercussions of making an autobiographical film. Mumblecore made a trope of actors having the same names as their characters, but how much they were really “being themselves” is up for debate. Maybe the closest analog for what Nanjiani does in The Big Sick is Audie Murphy in To Hell and Back, only Murphy was a Congressional Medal of Honor winner, and Nanjiani was a comedian.

Not to belittle the comedian’s courage. Ever tried to do standup? It’s scary. It’s even harder at Kumail’s at level, which is “You put out the chairs at the comedy club, so you get to do five minutes of material.” Kumail’s got a squad of fellow comedians suffering in the trenches, including Aidy Bryant and Bo Burnham, and a side hustle as an Uber driver. (This is the first clue as to the level of authenticity in The Big Sick. Nanjiani and Gordon got married in 2007, while Uber didn’t get started until 2009.) One night at the club, he gets especially big laughs from a cute girl in the audience and introduces himself afterward. Emily is played by Zoe Kazan, who does a fantastic job. She’s a North Carolina girl in Chicago to go to grad school and become a therapist. She continues to insist that she is not interested in dating anyone, even as the number of their dates ticks upwards.

But their budding romance threatens to stall out because of cultural forces they can’t control. Kumail’s got a traditional Pakistani family, and that means he’s expected to acquiesce to an arranged marriage. The portrayal of family is another factor that makes The Big Sick an exceptional and unconventional rom-com. It’s clear that Kumail gets his razor wit from his father, played by Anupam Kher, and brother, played by Adeel Akhtar. His long-suffering mother Sharmeen (Zenobia Shroff), tries to set Kumail up with a long list of what are certainly suitable bridal choices, but none of them are Emily. Kumail is certain that if his family knows he’s in love with a white girl, he’ll be disowned, so he pushes Emily away. That’s when tragedy strikes.

Emily’s parents, with whom Kumail gets unexpectedly well acquainted, are played by Ray Romano and Holly Hunter. Romano gets laughs while delivering a performance of unexpected depth — I’ve never been a fan, but he does good work here. Hunter looks relaxed and in her element, shining in her individual scenes while playing perfectly with the ensemble.

The Big Sick is a balancing act that could have easily descended into either schmaltz or self aggrandizement. Director Michael Showalter must get a lot of credit for keeping the tone exactly right and pulling great performances out of the skilled cast. This is a comedy with real-life stakes that’s not about being cruel to anyone. It’s also a little shaggy and loose, which is excusable because the characters are so fun to be around. A tighter edit might have elevated The Big Sick to true greatness, but pretty darn good doesn’t feel like settling.