Everything Everywhere All at Once (A24, IAC [InterActiveCorps] Films, Gozie AGBO, Year of the Rat, Ley Line Entertainment, Hotdog Hands, A Really Happy Film, Lionsgate Home Entertainment, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, September 15) I ran a Blu-Ray disc of the 2022 Academy Award-winning Best Picture, Everything Everywhere All at Once, which won seven of the 11 Oscars it was nominated for, including Best Actress for Michelle Yeoh, Best Supporting Actress for Jamie Lee Curtis (beating out the quite fine Asian-American Stephanie Hsu – pronounced “shoe” – who played Michelle Yeoh’s daughter in the same film), Best Supporting Actor for Ke Huy Kwan as Yeoh’s husband, Best Editing for Paul Rogers and both Best Direction and Best Original Screenplay for the film’s auteurs, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, colloquially known as “The Daniels.” According to the Wikipedia page on the movie, “The film explores philosophical themes such as existentialism, nihilism, surrealism, and absurdism, as well as themes such as neurodivergence, depression, generational trauma, and Asian-American identity.” That’s sort of correct, though the movie explores those themes in a relentlessly superficial way in which they’re more or less just thrown at us helter-skelter, with little or no psychological or philosophical depth. The film is built around the concept of the “multiverse,” the idea that the universe we live in and know about is just one of many separate ones, and though they are roughly similar there are built-in differences in detail. When people or events in one universe intersect with those in another, strange anomalies happen. And yet one of the things I liked about Everything Everywhere All at Once that kept it from being just another post-modern slog-fest à la Olivier Assayas’s demonlover or Gus Van Sant’s Gerry (two of the worst movies I saw in my early-2000’s stint attending film review screenings at the Landmark Hillcrest for Zenger’s Newsmagazine) is that The Daniels kept their senses of humor intact.

Much of this film is laugh-out-loud funny, including the opening establishing sequences set at the laundromat owned by Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) and her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan). Their taxes are being audited by a bitchy Internal Revenue Service widow named Deirdre Beaubiedre (Jamie Lee Curtis), who insists – among other things – that the Wangs can’t deduct the cost of a karaoke machine as a business expense. (Evelyn bought a karaoke machine to practice her singing, but it occurred to me that if she’d set it up on the floor of the laundromat and allowed customers to use it while waiting for their clothes to be finished, it could have been a legitimate business expense.) Suddenly Waymond, who’s filed a petition for divorce but more to get his wife to talk to him about their relationship than he seriously wants out of it, is taken over by his identity from one of the other multiverses, “Alpha-Waymond,” who’s there to tell Evelyn that the multiverse needs her help to vanquish a malevolent spirit called “Jobu Tupaki.” Evelyn has her own set of problems in this universe, including an overbearing father she calls “Gong Gong” (the term for “grandfather” in Cantonese Chinese) who’s in town to attend her Lunar New Year party; and her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu), who’s involved in a Lesbian relationship with a white girl named Becky Sregor (Tallie Medel). Evelyn ticks off her daughter big-time when her dad asks her who Becky is and Evelyn says she’s her daughter’s “good friend.” As the film progresses through various multiverses – including one in which Evelyn became a huge singing and movie star, one in which she was a Benihana chef – Jobu Tupaki takes possession of Evelyn’s daughter Joy, and they create a black hole inside a giant “Everything Bagel” (a term that I’d never heard until one of my home-care clients asked me for one about a decade ago). Evelyn’s dad, or his “alpha” personality, instructs both Evelyn and Joy to enter the “Everything Bagel” and accept death to save the universe from Jobu Tupaki.

There are also a lot of kung fu-style fight scenes; I didn’t count them, but Charles thought this film had more credited stunt people than Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. Indeed, one imdb.com reviewer complained that about three-fourths of this movie took place during various combats between its characters. And there’s a great sequence in which both Evelyn and Joy end up in an alternate multiverse Earth which never evolved the conditions to create life, so they end up as rocks (albeit sentient rocks who are shown communicating telepathically; their dialogue is printed on the screen so we know what they’re saying to each other). There’s also an alternate version of human evolution in which people have hot dogs on the ends of their hands instead of fingers; in this multiverse Evelyn and IRS auditor Deirdre become Lesbian lovers themselves and one way they have sex is to eat each other’s finger-hot dogs (which brings new meaning to the slogan “finger-licking good”). In this sequence Deirdre plays Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” on the piano with her toes (with painted nails), which in this multiverse’s Earth have taken the place of people’s uselessly flopping fingers. And of course, this being a post-modern movie, it’s full of references to other movies, some of them quite obvious – like the parody of the Disney-Pixar computer-animated Ratatouille (in which a poor cook becomes a great chef thanks to the rat hiding inside his chef’s hat, only here instead of a rat it’s a raccoon and it’s too big to hide under a hat, so it just sits there on top of the cook’s head until the driver of an Animal Control van seizes it and its owner has to rescue it à la Chaplin’s The Kid), or the use of Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra for the scene in which humans evolve with hot-dog fingers (though the version used is a Naxos recording by the Polish Radio Symphony under Antoni Wit, not the Vienna Philharmonic/Herbert von Karajan version used in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Tim Burton’s brilliant parody in the 2005 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory).

Some of the movie references are a bit more obscure; Charles found a parallel to My Beautiful Laundrette (in which the young couple involved in the laundry business are Gay men instead of Lesbians) while I thought of Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet (in which a traditional Chinese father is trying to arrange an opposite-sex marriage for his son, who’s not only Gay but has a white partner). It all ends happily, with each member of the Wang family restored to their normal identity in this universe, and Evelyn introducing Becky to her father as Joy’s “girlfriend” (and in the final scenes we get to see Joy and Becky kiss, thereby raising themselves out of the maddening category of movie homosexuals in which we’re told they are Gay or Lesbian but never actually see them in a physical display of affection with a member of their own gender), while they get another shot at filing their taxes and Evelyn briefly loses focus while she’s distracted by her other multiverse identities, only to snap to at Waymond’s call. I’m not sure what I think of Everything Everywhere All at Once overall; there were certainly parts of it I found more tiresome than entertaining, yet I genuinely enjoyed a great deal of it. Its success at the Academy Awards seems to have been more a collective realization by enough of the Academy membership that it was more than past time to start giving awards to Asian actors and filmmakers than an acknowledgment of any special quality in this film, and one thing I could fault The Daniels for is they really didn’t draw on Asian philosophies in their depiction of the multiverse. Instead it’s just a very Western post-modern gimmick. And yet so few films today show anything like the level of imagination of this one that I really can’t be too hard of it, even though much of it reminded me of Edgar Allan Poe’s comment on Ralph Waldo Emerson: that he was trying to get his readers to think, “This must really be profound, for I do not understand it myself.”