Courtesy AGBO
For those who’ve yet to fall under Michelle Yeoh’s spell (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, anyone?! Crazy Rich Asians?!), make it your business to head into theaters for Everything Everywhere All at Once, a brilliant sendup of the evermore commonplace concept of infinite realities—you know; the multiverse. Brought to us by the inimitably strange directing team of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, aka Daniels (the auteurs behind the bold and beautifully bizarre Swiss Army Man), it’s the type of film that should sate the heady science nerds, the self-assigned cultural elite and those who just plain want to see a weird movie rolled up into a sci-fi/rom-com/kung fu/family story.
Here we follow Evelyn (Yeoh) and Waymond Wang (Ke Huy Quan of Goonies and Temple of Doom fame), a long-married couple who live above the middling laundromat they run together. As the Wangs face an IRS audit from a seemingly heartless agent (Jamie Lee Curtis, who gets gloriously weird), Waymond wants a divorce, and their daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) isn’t helping so much as she seems hellbent on using her girlfriend to freak out her folks. It’s a bit of a humdrum life until an alternate-universe Waymond appears, kung fu fanny pack in hand, to inform Evelyn she’s the last hope in facing a threat to the infinitely layered universes that make up reality. A dark presence called Jobu Tupaki is killing Wangs and anyone else they encounter across timelines. Using tech to take over the consciousnesses of their multiverse counterparts, Waymond and Evelyn can instantly learn the skills of their other life versions, and that’s precisely how a middle-aged laundromat owner becomes a master of martial arts, a flawless singer, a talented movie star and, ultimately, learns acceptance.
Yeoh is absolutely riveting as the dissatisfied mother, and whereas her kung fu skills have always been apparent, here she shows off her acting chops. It’s a pleasant surprise to learn she’s a secret goofball, and her journey feels reminiscent of Jennifer Lawrence’s in Aranofsky’s Mother!, only more focused and relatable. In the quieter moments, even the very funny ones, Yeoh’s range feels unmatched. Quan, meanwhile, steals the show often, and his presence as the all-important jester archetype softens Yeoh’s character, which is not to say he isn’t a badass in his own right. Hsu might be the true breakout, though, pulling double duty as the chaotic daughter and the even more chaotic villain. Of course, nothing is simple in Daniels’ vision—and three cheers to Jamie Lee for nailing emotional scenes with literal hot dog fingers.
The humor cuts the tension while helping to make sense of the converging timelines, though it might help to have read comic books one’s whole life. Even still, one needn’t have a physics degree to get into why Everything Everywhere All at Once is so fun. It begs for repeated viewings, not least of which for Yeoh’s career-defining performance. People will talk about this one for years to come, and it’s likely to inspire a whole new generation of filmmakers. Rarely does something so weird make its way into the mainstream, but thank goodness it did.
9
+Every performance; chaos; martial arts
-Could alienate some
Everything Everywhere All at Once
Directed by Daniels
With Yeoh, Quan, Hsu and Curtis
Center for Contemporary Arts, Violet Crown, R, 139 min.
