Yes, Everything Everywhere All at Once (Everything from here on) came out roughly eight months ago, but it’s Oscar season and this absolutely bonkers but beautiful film was rightfully nominated for 11 awards (the most of any film this year) including Best Picture and Best Directing.
If you haven’t seen it yet (as I had not) and have any interest at all, there’s no easier time to watch Everything. The film begins at a kinetic pace—and rarely lets up—at the home of the Wang family, where Evelyn is trying to get her taxes together while also planning for a lunar New Year’s party in the family laundromat one floor below. Her husband Waymond (Quan) is trying to help out while also trying to find the right time to hand Evelyn divorce papers. Their daughter Joy (Hsu) is reluctantly joining them with her girlfriend Becky, whom Evelyn willfully refers to as “Joy’s friend,” especially in front of her ailing 90-year-old father Gong Gong (Hong).
This frenetic family dynamic serves as the jumping pad for a Matrix-esque multi-dimensional action comedy-drama, when Evelyn is abruptly called upon mid-audit to save the universes, all of them. All of a sudden her meek husband is a no-nonsense super spy giving Evelyn orders while the stern auditor Deirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis) becomes a pipe-wielding maniac.
The wild and unexpected turns that Everything takes only require a few moments of orientation before the superb direction and deft editing make something as strange and off-putting as a “literal everything bagel” and a “hot-dog finger universe” seem as natural and inevitable as rain.
This is the same directing duo (Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, aka Daniels) that made the Daniel Radcliffe and Paul Dano farting-corpse movie Swiss Army Man (so many Dans). Many trusted sources urged me to watch that movie, calling it “very funny” and “surprisingly sweet.” I still haven’t watched it, but after seeing Everything, I realize that my biggest fear of the Daniels was that they were not only gross and weird, but cynical.
If Everything Everywhere All at Once is any indication, they are anything but cynical. Yes, Everything can be gross, and yes, it is definitely very weird—a compliment in my book—but it is also a very sincere and heartfelt film. Yeoh and Quan are absolutely phenomenal. Seeing Ke Huy Quan (The Goonies, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) acting again after such a long hiatus, and in his best role ever (I don’t say that lightly), is nothing short of awe-inspiring.
Somehow, a weirdo directing duo wrapped a simple story of a Chinese-American family’s intergenerational trauma in a package of Michel Gondry meets Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and made it a universal experience, and a tearfully delightful one at that. I only docked it half a star for one too many hot-dog finger scenes; they really shove ’em down your throat.
