Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022 | USA | 140 Minutes | DANIELS, Kwan and Scheinert)
It’s not often in this age of the hype cycle that a highly anticipated movie exceeds already incredibly high expectations, but I suppose that a film ambitiously (and accurately) titled Everything Everywhere All At Once should damned well be the film to do it. What a tremendous rush to see DANIELS doing seemingly whatever they want with an apparently unlimited toolkit.
I shouldn’t be surprised. These are the guys (Daniel Kwan and Schienert, who work together as “DANIELS”) who previously made my heart explode with Swiss Army Man, in which a depressed Paul Dano befriends a corpse played by Daniel Radcliffe whose regurgitations, erections, and flatulence literally and figuratively save his life. How could their long-gestating googley-eyed follow-up be anything other than a mind-expanding, heart-tugging, thrill ride of discovery?
Despite the convulsions that shook the internet when the first trailer dropped, I didn’t get a chance to watch it right away, found myself distracted before clicking play, and managed to make it into the theater knowing almost nothing about what I was going to see other than something involving “multiverse”, a leading role for Michelle Yeoh, and that it was arriving after a rapturous SXSW premiere. If you’ve made it this far with similar levels of blissful ignorance and spirit of eager curiosity, I highly recommend doing the same. I firmly believe that good stories can’t be “spoiled” but can occasionally still be a heck of a lot of fun to be dropped into the middle of something and have your breath taken away by where it goes.
With that said, let’s get into it, at least a little bit.
The film opens on a perpetually-distracted Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh), sorting through mountains of tax documents and receipts that cover the dining room table in the cluttered apartment above the laundromat that she and her too-sweet husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan, yes, the Ke Huy Quan from Goonies and Indiana Jones!) have run since leaving family behind to immigrate to the United States. Juggling demanding interruptions from customers, preparing food for the evening’s Chinese New Year celebrations, and fretting over how her long-estranged elderly father (James Hong) will acclimate to the unfamiliar new surroundings in her adopted country, she’s understandably frazzled. Her now-adult daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu), frequently relied upon as a first-generation translator, isn’t around enough and when she is, Evelyn is uncomfortable with the prospect of telling her father that his granddaughter has a girlfriend. Looming above all the chaos is an appointment with an ominous and powerful force of dark indifference: the Internal Revenue Service and one of their menacingly through auditors, Deirdre (a frumpily stern Jamie Lee Curtis in a severe blonde wig).
As if the tax problems of an immigrant family with questionable filing practices aren’t high enough stakes, their visit to the sprawling warren of government employee cubicles soon cracks open to reveal an even grander, infinitely more expensive, and utterly overwhelming crisis on the horizons of the entire multiverse. In place of CGI portals and visual effects sorcery of a Marvel film, DANIELS ground their introduction to the interdimensional adventure first in nimble acting and then with escalating levels of absurdity, leaving us to wonder whether Evelyn’s on the verge of a breakdown or whether the whole universe is about to collapse or if it’s just her own sanity that’s crumbling. By the time a character chews through a tube of chapstick and dispatches nefarious body-snatchers in a kung-fu style smackdown with a fanny pack as his choice of stunningly lethal weapon, there’s no turning back.
Throwing touchstones like Fight Club and The Matrix into a blender, DANIELS revel in introducing Yeoh’s initially-reluctant Evelyn to the concept of a fragmented realities, each infinite possibility differing by cascades of tiny choices. With disarmingly simple practical effects — cheap sunglasses, oversized earpieces, outdated cell phone apps — straight out of community access television studio, they build a universe in which our Evelyn, with her stunning lack of success, is the avatar that the whole damned multiverse needs most. Every discarded hobby, misplaced ambition, and misunderstood fact makes her imminently qualified to “verse-jump”, through embracing improbabilities, into other possible lives, absorb the expertise of her fractured mirror versions of herself, fend-off assassins, and confront the mysteriously vengeful “Jobu Tupaki” who threatens to collapse infinite realities into nothingness.
If this sounds like a lot to take in, it is. And Yeoh’s nimble performance is the ideal guide as Evelyn first recoils, but her candid dismissal of soon gives way to being unable to resist the appeal of luxuriating in how her life could’ve turned out. Her escapes from the oppressive reality of the IRS offices serve as playgrounds for DANIELS to riff on other film references as diverse as 2001: A Space Odyssey, In the Mood For Love, and somehow even Ratatouille. Each are a vehicle for Evelyn to briefly shed her rumpled life in favor of celebrity glamor, classic kung fu, all the way to the furthest reaches of stoned late night possibilities. Each of these jumps reveals new depths and possibilities, while also powering up our heroine in a sequence of increasingly manic fight sequences, culminating with a hilariously slippery confrontation with the multiverse destroying big bad. It’s a visual feast and a thrillingly exhausting sprint.
Yet that’s only the first act! The mania of bizarre explosive action, oppressive distractions, and chosen one narrative gives way to a second act that confronts the consequences of having seen it all. Capturing the mood of our young century (and probably all centuries before us), DANIELS eventually reveal their true concerns. Namely, the dangerous allure of accepting the sweet embrace of nihilism and the outstanding comfort of recognizing that absolutely nothing you do matters (to anyone but you). It’s like an hour of that scene in The Tree of Life where one dinosaur decides whether to crush another dinosaur’s neck in a river, except this cosmic choice between compassion and destruction plays out with googly eyes and an ominous spinning everything bagel.
Somehow, no level of ridiculous whimsy or escalations of ludicrousness diminish the emotional wallop. I was moved to tears by wordless sequences of rocks, was overcome with laughter at the embodiment of a misremembered Pixar movie, and was surprised by the depth of feeling evoked a universe of hot dog hands. The visual pyrotechnics would be nothing without the exceptionally malleable cast who carry the film with diverse and necessarily multifaceted performances. It’s a script that gives everyone plenty to do, most impressively, never losing track of the human beings in the dazzling displays of creative fireworks. Because of this, the whole maximalist endeavor thrives in the contrast of situating zany action in the drab monotony of a government office, a well-worn apartment, and a neighborhood laundromat and locating the heart of a comical multidimensional conflict in one family’s struggles to connect. With seemingly limitless creativity, DANIELS deliver an uproarious action comedy with an unlikely heroine that is also a dazzling, timely, and deeply effective exploration of choosing meaning amid chaos and despair.
Everything Everywhere All At Once arrives in local theaters on April 1st
Photo courtesy A24.