Befitting the wild-ass movie itself, I’m of multiple minds about Everything Everywhere All at Once, which speaks fluent jibber-jabber about alternate universes and “verse-jumping.” It’s about a hundred different things — nihilism, choices, motherhood, the bone-cracking clarity of martial arts — and so comes dangerously close to being about nothing. It’s ambitious as all get-out, and always has a sight gag or a fight scene to perk things up when the goings get too cerebral. It’s restless, relentless entertainment, which would be fine at an hour and a half, but EEAAO rambles and verse-jumps its way to two hours and thirteen minutes, less six minutes of end credits, and sometimes it seems a bit much, a bit aggressive and draining.
And then, as if on cue, something happens like Jamie Lee Curtis playing a version of “Claire de Lune” on her piano with her toes, because her fingers are hot dogs, and one’s mood lifts again. Maybe a movie so tirelessly determined to show us things we haven’t seen before can’t escape being cluttered and shambolic occasionally, or even often; EEAAO reminded me of Terry Gilliam, but his better films, which have a better balance between honking nonsense and visionary bravado, so that one feeds into the other. I’m also tickled pink that the movie is one of the year’s great unexpected success stories, a genuine sleeper word-of-mouth hit with, wonder of wonders, Michelle Yeoh her own fabulous self front and center.
Yeoh is Evelyn Wang, who runs a laundromat with husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan). The laundromat is in trouble with the IRS, which, in the person of auditor Deirdre Beaubeirdre (Curtis), wonders why Evelyn has declared so many things as business write-offs. The IRS stuff seems unnecessary except as a part of glum, stressful reality we become desperate to escape (a further link to Gilliam). And we do, when an alternate-universe version of Waymond visits Evelyn to tell her that a mad version of their daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) threatens the existence of the multiverse. I’m not going to explain how, or why; that’s the movie’s job. Evelyn suddenly knows martial arts, or she has hot dogs for hands, or she’s a rock talking with a rock version of her daughter in a universe where life didn’t happen.
Written and directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, aka Daniels (Swiss Army Man), EEAAO isn’t all cold, clever pizzazz; some of it is legitimately moving, and gets at the specific pains of an Asian-American family in a more lateral and artistic way than it might have with a more conventional narrative. Pain and disappointment are passed down the generations; a giant, fearsome Everything Bagel becomes a symbol of anything life-annihilating or self-denying that consumes us from within. Some of this sounds heady, and then the movie pulls out the rug and gives us a sequence with various verse-jumpers each doing their own required weird thing in order to launch into the next universe. Interesting storage spaces are discovered for trophies. Googly eyes stand in for levity in the midst of the grim assembly line of life.
But. As I said before, a movie that can mean everything can also mean nothing, a paradox exemplified in-story, by Alpha Joy (called Jobu Tupaki) and her Everything Bagel. The movie suggests that the notion of everything — the uncountable number of universes and realities — can spook us into the numb but comforting embrace of nothingness, or nihilism. Thus EEAAO incorporates and comments on its own internal gremlins. As more people watch it, it’s going to be fun to read everyone’s interpretations of it — perhaps more fun than actually watching it. Again, it can get exhausting, and not just narratively; the amount of effort it must have taken to stitch this thing together gives me a headache just thinking about it. I admire it much more readily than I love or even like it. But the fact that movies like this can still be made — and prosper — proves to me that the eulogy for cinema can wait another few years.