Tender Discomfort

Sorry for being late on this. Last week ended up being just a nightmare at work with long days and significantly less downtime than I’m used to. That made it hard to brainstorm and prepare for this piece. Also, I’m deep in the throes of training for a half-marathon (my first ever) in three weeks. Wish me luck because given how things are going, I’m desperately going to need it. Now onto the review

I am a conflict averse person. This is ironic given that I entered a field where a big part of the job is arguing with other people. I’ve always wanted to help people and make them happy. This people pleasing tendency of mine has led to a lot of passivity, avoidance, and anxiety over the years. Unsurprisingly and stereotypically, a lot of this can be traced back to growing up in an anxious/avoidant family. This helped to lay a groundwork such that the movie A Nice Indian Boy was particularly meaningful to me.

The synopsis for the movie going around social media and movie theaters is this: “When Naveen brings his fiancé Jay home to meet his traditional Indian family, they must contend with accepting his white-orphan-artist boyfriend and helping them plan the Indian wedding of their dreams.”

This was enough to get me in the door, but is such a gross oversimplification of the film that I want to make a few things clear. When I saw this blurb, I thought this was going to begin with a well established relationship, taking notes from movies like Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner or Meet the Parents. Instead, this movie takes its time before Jay and Naveen are introduced, and meeting the parents doesn’t happen until the movie is almost at the halfway point. The movie is explicit that it wants to take notes from the Indian film tradition and that it wants to focus on the relationship holistically rather than just the meet cute, or just the wedding. The Bollywood classic DDLJ is even an important plot point. (Relatedly, if people would be interested in hearing about my favorite Indian movies, let me know. I love talking about the maximalism of Indian cinema).

Because the movie starts wi0th Naveen as a single, fairly repressed gay man, the audience gets the benefit of seeing him gradually open up throughout the course of the movie. At the beginning, Naveen is so painfully shy and so unwilling to take any sort of chance that might end in pain, seemingly content to let his job at a hospital consume his life with the occasional obligatory dinner with family. It takes so much effort and gradual coaxing from Jay for Naveen to start to open up, but even this only gets Naveen to compartmentalize. Naveen and Jay are able to hit it off because Jay was adopted and subsequently steeped in Indian culture by his adoptive parents. They meet at a temple, they love the same movies, they cook the same food, but they ended up being such different people. Naveen values the freedom and joy that comes from his relationship with Jay, but it takes external pressure to force Naveen to introduce Jay to his family. And later it is only the risk of losing Jay that gets Naveen to eventually take a stand against his family (I guess that’s a spoiler, but has there ever been a romcom that didn’t pretend like the leads were going to break up for a moment).

This is a delightfully earnest movie. Naveen and Jay are in some ways cast as the odd couple, with Jay being outgoing, confident, and proudly queer, whereas Naveen is introverted, repressed and ashamed. But it’s exceedingly obvious that Jay lives the type of life that Naveen wants to have. Jay gets to be an artist, Naveen had to become a doctor (classic). Jay has both a large group of casual friends, and is so close with his inner circle that they are like family. Naveen at the start of the movie is showcased as having a single friend at work that he mostly gets along with, but his friend is the one that’s putting in most of the work in their friendship. Naveen wants to be more, he wants to be different, but he can’t imagine a world outside the strict boundaries he’s set for himself until Jay helps him open up. The love Jay has for Naveen is so deep, and Naveen’s struggle to adequately reciprocate is what’s truly the driving force of the movie.

I think that this is a good place to point out how great a job Karan Soni does in this role. I first saw him as Dopinder in the Deadpool movies, then later in Miracle Workers and Abbott Elementary, and most recently as Pavitr Prabhakar (Spider-man India) in the latest Spiderverse movie. In all those prior roles, and especially as Dopinder, he plays outgoing, over-the-top characters, which honestly is what I was expecting here, at least to a degree. I anticipated the sort of overacting which is common in Indian movies, which can be used to great effect, with Naveen being the sort of gay disaster character that is becoming increasingly common.

But that’s not what this role is. Soni doesn’t bring that level of energy until the very end of the film, with Naveen staying fairly mild throughout the movie, and even in his emotional moments, they are less outbursts and more like resignations. This is a movie that thrives on micro expressions and subtle cues, and seeing the different characters slowly soften expressions, gradually turn to smiles, and slowly lose the bite from their words. In some characters this change is more extreme than others, almost to the point of disbelief with Naveen’s father, but Karan Soni does a great job showcasing the gradual shift that is happening in Naveen’s personality.

Everyone else is great as well. I particularly like Jonathan Groff’ as Jay and Sunita Mani as Naveen’s catty sister Arundhathi. For having a Tony winner in the movie and lots of references to musical Indian movies, Groff only sings once and he sings increasingly poorly in that scene. Having professional singers do so poorly is always a gag I’m down for (even if SNL beat Domingo to death). And Mani is so good playing the straight man to the comedy of the other characters, switching between deadpan, coy, and callous, such that when her character growth comes, it’s such a delight.

For as much as I love this movie, it’s not perfect. I don’t think the movie ever quite tackles just how bad a boyfriend Naveen is to Jay. We are shown again and again all the work that Jay is putting into the relationship, only to see Naveen self-sabotage and consistently place his relationship with his family over his relationship with Jay. Naveen is so reliant on Jay and we don’t see enough of Naveen giving back. Naveen is so terrified of even the chance of disapproval from his family that he is willing to hurt Jay over and over again. And while Naveen apologizes, the setup is such that Jay is hardly given the agency to push back at Naveen. It’s never entirely clear what Jay sees in Naveen, from the moment they first meet to their happily ever after. While Naveen improves as the movie goes on, even at his best his actions tend to be more for his benefit rather than Jay’s (with a few truly touching exceptions).

I would have liked if this movie was gayer if I’m honest with myself. Even though Naveen’s repressed personality is inherently tied to his queerness, as an audience member, it’s not hard to see how this movie could have played out pretty similarly with a straight relationship. While queerness is an intrinsic part of Jay’s life, it never seems as though it’s as necessary to Naveen. While I agree that not every gay love story needs to be campy and dramatic, I also feel that things here were more toned down than they needed to be, and in the current climate particularly I think making things a bit more dynamic would have been great.

The other part of this movie that felt somewhat hollow is the fact that there’s little actual conflict for Naveen to deal with from his family. So many of the fears he has about the situation end up merely being fears and projections. Naveen’s family does love him. They are not ashamed of his queerness, and while they are surprised by Jay, they’re never opposed to him. It would have been interesting to see a version of this where Naveen actually has to win over his parents. So when Naveen’s parents do “come around,” it is more of an inevitability rather than any actual sort of resolution. Also the emotional 180 his parents do is pretty unrealistic, and they practically become different people. I would have preferred to see some of the work that was shown in getting Naveen to open up to be shown with his parents as well.

But part of why this doesn’t happen is because this is an incredibly tight movie. This movie is an incredibly tight, but incredibly stuffed 96 minutes. This movie really does show the entire arc of Naveen and Jay’s relationship, and in doing so a few corners were cut to keep it at Hollywood’s favorite length. To give the crew credit, this movie feels longer than it actually is (complimentary). I don’t know how they managed to stuff as much story in here as they did. But given the references to Bollywood maximalism and the slight nods in the story’s structure, I would have loved another 30-45 minutes to really tie together the few loose ends that this movie has. Also, if you’re going to reference DDLJ and Bollywood, you’ve really gotta have some musical numbers.

At the end of the day, I love this movie more than it deserves, much like Jay loves Naveen more than is deserved. Naveen was an incredibly resonant character for me, in ways good and terrible, and that relatability carried my enjoyment of this movie from it’s deserved spot as a good 4⭐ to a guilty pleasure 5⭐. This movie had me laughing, crying, and a few times both at once. It’s tender, earnest, painful, and engaging. Everything I want from a romcom was here in spades, and for all the movie’s faults, the fact that there wasn’t much actual conflict ended up being okay for me. With everything that’s happening right now, a light, queer romcom really hit the spot, and I would strongly encourage checking it out while it’s in theaters.

That’s a wrap for this week. I wanted to do a poll for but it turns out that’s a feature you have to pay for. Maybe one day in the far, far future. Either that or I’ll just put it on my Instagram, we’ll see. If you check the movie out, please let me know. I’d love to hear what others think of it. As always, please recommend me things! I’m hopeful that next week will be my first reader recommended segment.

Until next week, take care of yourselves.

Soma