“Everything Everywhere All at Once” is utterly fantastic—see it in theaters if you can
Marriage is doing laundry and taxes together until the end. Life is a mess of noise punctuated by fleeting moments of clarity. Each moment, each choice makes manifest an infinite array of alternate choices that echo endlessly...
I've always been interested in notions of eternal return after a self-important English AP teacher decided that senior year English should be a study in existentialism. Which actually seems funny now that I am an adult. On offer that year: The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Things Fall Apart, The Metamorphosis, a section on Modernism and Crime and Punishment. That last title describes in full the craven act of making us read that as the last book senior year--a joke I am pretty sure he made in class at the time.
Anyway, the title alone roots us in the idea of eternal return: Everything Everywhere All At Once is just that. It is a meta-study on the power of choice, how those choices shape us, and, the opportunity cost created by them.
As if that weren't enough to be about, it layers in a moving tale about how family and relationships are often at the nexus of those choices. How it can be both catalyst and outcome.
Evelyn Wang is middling, she lives a well-trod life that is fundamentally unremarkable. She owns a small business with her husband and today is Lunar New Year. Her father is in town and she is keen to impress. Simultaneously, today is the day of her audit, she must meet with the IRS and sort her finances lest she lose the business. Today is also the day her daughter Joy has chosen to introduce Becky, Joy's girlfriend to Gong Gong, Evelyn's father, Joy's grandfather.
But "today" gets thrown off track when Evelyn discovers not only that she can hop across the multiverse, but that she must in order to save humanity and her daughter.
What follows is a wild tale, that is very fun to watch. It is bawdy and crude at times but in the most joyful way. There are outfits, butt plugs (oh the butt plugs), and even horrible paper cuts, it's a muppet-like Bizzaro world that feels like it is crashing all around you in a deafening cacophony.
But through the noise, past the void created by the everything bagel. There is kindness and love, and an actually quite quiet tale about family.
It's refreshing to see Yeoh get to stretch her wings. She has long been my favorite action star, and her career has spanned the years.
This most recent decade has seen a deserved brightening of her spotlight with meaty roles like that of Philippa Georgiou on Star Trek: Discovery and within blockbuster hits like Crazy Rich Asians and Shang Chi and The Legend of Ten Rings. She has always been, and will always be, an icon.
With Evelyn Wang we get to see her not as an idolized goddess or Emperor but as a kind of difficult and unlikeable woman. It seems this is a trend of late in Hollywood, with films like The Lost Daughter, The Babadook, and even Gunpowder Milkshake, (another movie starring Yeoh) focused on women who are unnatural mothers or have a problematic relationship with motherhood.
It's nice to see more nuanced explorations of motherhood depicted onscreen and to have a space for female anxieties to have a voice. I hope we continue to see more women like Evelyn on screen and I hope they are played with as much empathy and care as Yeoh has infused in this performance.