Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022, Dir. Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert):
There’s lowbrow and highbrow. But all the brows are good.
Daniel Scheinert
Say what you want about the filmmaking duo known as Daniels (Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert), but you can’t say they’re ordinary. For proof, look no further than their first feature Swiss Army Man (2016), which starred Daniel Radcliffe (aka Harry Potter) as a flatulent talking corpse. More cockeyed than coherent, Swiss Army Man may have lacked method behind its one-joke madness, but lurking beneath the fart gags was a glimmer of soul, as the Daniels slipped in delicate musings on male ego, vulnerability and companionship.
With Everything Everywhere All At Once, the Daniels have landed on a story that’s more intelligible and more ambitious: a zonked-out action fantasy that cribs from comic-book multiverses and The Matrix. The film’s first image of happy faces in a mirror suggests familial bliss, but moments later we’re literally pulled through the looking glass to the ugly truth on the other side. Immigrant laundromat owner Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) is having a very bad day: her business is flailing, IRS agent Deirdre (pot-bellied, frumpy Jamie Lee Curtis) is breathing down her neck and her docile husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) is finally working up the nerve to serve her divorce papers. Evelyn’s unhappiness is contagious, especially for her daughter Joy (Steph Hsu), who just wants her mother to accept her and her new girlfriend Becky (Tallie Medel) for who they are. No such luck—emotionally constipated, Evelyn can only show affection through disapproval: “You have to try eating healthier. You are getting fat.”
Everything‘s opening scenes are pitched at a strident level, as Evelyn harumphs, snaps, grumbles and generally slunks through her day. Cast against type, Yeoh tamps down her usual “dashing woman of action” persona to play a husk of a human, stuck in an irritable stupor. As the film’s first act lumbers on and indignities accumulate, we’re forced to wonder: Is Evelyn as a character too far gone for even Yeoh to salvage?
And then, as is their wont, the Daniels go bug-nuts. A far more heroic Waymond from an alternate “Alpha” universe takes over our Waymond’s body, and introduces Evelyn to multiple realities, thanks to cryptic directions (“Switch shoes to the wrong feet, imagine you’re in the janitor’s closet, hold that thought, and push the green button”) and nifty effects that send Evelyn hurtling across countless dimensions within a few seconds. As she struggles to shake off her spiritual fog and come to grips with this knowledge, miracles become the order of the day, as Alpha-Waymond takes out a passel of security guards with the aplomb of Bruce Lee, if Bruce Lee was armed with a fanny pack rather than numchucks.
From that point forward, we hurtle head-first into chaos. The Daniels specialize in non-sequiturs, and while Everything takes advantage of its multiverse concept to muse on how random chance can lead to wildly divergent fates, it also gives its sci-fi elements absurd twists. To “verse jump” to alternate universes, one must perform random actions, such as chomping on chapstick, giving your fingers four paper cuts, or (in the film’s most outrageous moment) sitting down very hard on a dildo. Soon allies and enemies from all manner of alternate universes have converged on Evelyn, convinced she’s the one specific Evelyn who can vanquish dimension-hopping villain Jobu Tupaki (Hsu).
As it turns out, Jobu is the darkest version of Joy, driven insane by the meaninglessness of every universe and committed to eradicating them all, via a bagel that’s become a black hole. “When you really put everything on a bagel, it becomes the truth,” Jobu explains to Evelyn. “Nothing matters.” Mirroring Jobu, Evelyn herself has nothing left to lose. (“You are living your worst you,” Alpha-Waymond informs her.) Conversely, this allows her the freedom to be anything she wants to be, and the clash of Evelyn and Jobu’s perspectives on the nothing of it all takes on Zen undertones, especially when they end up in a universe in which they’re both primordial rocks, their conversation carried out in silence and subtitles.
While Marvel uses multiverses to tie its own franchises together, Everything uses them to more personal (and idiosyncratic) ends, as the Daniels reference random pop cinema touchpoints. A universe in which Evelyn is a Michelle Yeoh-like movie star who romances a suave, successful version of Waymond has the sensual longueurs of a Wong Kar Wai movie. Another universe in which humans have hot dog wieners for fingers and Evelyn falls into a bittersweet romance with Deirdre lampoons Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey while recalling the mournful absurdity of Spike Jonze. Yet another universe finds Evelyn working as a hibachi chef alongside a prodigy (Harry Shum Jr.) who is given cooking tips by his pet raccoon, named (you guessed it) Raccacoonie. The fact that none of these references really have much of a bearing on the plot add to their charm, as do the film’s lo-fi special effects. Even the casting is a reflection of the Daniels’ sensibilities, which lean to the eighties side of the dial: Jamie Lee Curtis, Ke Huay Quan (best known for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Goonies) and the redoubtable James Hong, giving a zesty turn as Evelyn’s dad.
The Daniels throw these flamboyant touches at us fast and furious, even as the plot boils down to martial arts confrontations that pay homage to the slapstick excess of manga and Hong Kong action cinema. (At one point, an opponent naked from the waist down has his privates pixelated in the midst of combat.) While it’s a treat to see Yeoh take control of her destiny (with the help of some kung fu, natch), the fisticuffs are more dexterous than stirring, and the film’s cavalcade of nutty visuals wears thin in the second act, as Larkin Seiple’s cinematography mires us in visually murky locations.
You think because I’m kind that it means I’m naive, and maybe I am. It’s strategic and necessary. This is how I fight.
Waymond (Ke Huy Quan)
Fortunately, just when the whole enterprise looks like it might run off the rails, the Daniels hit us with a curveball: after a fake ending (replete with credits), Everything leaves the over-caffeinated exhaustion of its action set-pieces behind in favor of a measured final confrontation between Evelyn and her daughter. Drawing from Kwan’s own Chinese background, Everything ultimately reveals itself to be an examination of family dynamics, and how love can get misplaced between generations. The Daniels might push the mother-daughter conflict at the center of the story to comic-book extremes, but just as in Swiss Army Man, the emotions are grounded. “We’re all stupid, that’s the way we are,” Jobu insists, and what person who has ever gone through adolescence not felt a similar nihilism? Evelyn breaks the cycle of her own unhappiness with a simple thought: “Be kind, especially when we don’t know what’s going on.” Other recent multiverse movies have ended on CGI-enhanced visions of wormholes and splintering skies; this one opts for genuine human connection, in all its imperfection and inherent futility.
Silly, sloppy, yet strangely affecting, Everything Everywhere All at Once climaxes by thumbing its nose at its own premise: with so many universes and different lives to choose from, it suggests that maybe it’s better just to be present in the here and now. That modest conclusion is a refreshing rejoinder to the usual blockbuster antics, and if the Daniels take a circuitous route to get there, it still affords Yeoh an opportunity for an emotionally robust performance, where empathy, rather than a can of whoop-ass, saves the day. Of course all this is accomplished with a googly eye pasted on her forehead, mimicking the Third Eye of a Buddhist; as with everything the Daniels touch, the silly and the profound walk hand in hand. Everything is a mess of a movie all right, but Evelyn, finding her own voice in the nick of time, sums it up succinctly: “It’s okay to be a mess.” It’s a sentiment that packs the biggest wallop of all in a film that’s chock-full of them, and shows that the Daniels, for all their nuttiness, have a distinct voice all their own. ■
