By Jana Monji, AsAmNews Arts & Culture Reporter
Everything Everywhere All at Once is probably the best American multiverse movie we’ll see and certainly the best and only one featuring Asian and Asian American talent ever produced to date.
I know that’s a big claim, but consider how Asians were treated in the Spider-man Multiverse and how the MCU seems to be heading toward having a White man learn Asian mystic arts in Southeast Asia from a White woman. This is where we’re at despite the 2014 Disney Big Hero Six and the 2021 Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Yet, writers and directors, the Daniels, have made a decidedly adult film. It is rated R for violence, sexual situations, and language.
If you’ve seen the Daniels’ debut feature film, Swiss Army Man, you won’t be surprised. The 2016 surreal comedy was filled with jokes about flatulence and penile erections. This film was also rated R and yet the sexual content was sensitively, even coyly shot. If I have to be perfectly clear, I mean you won’t see naked penises.
In Everything Everywhere All at Once, you will see representations of naked penises. The R-rating for Everything Everywhere All at Once is a real shame because it will cut into the revenues and East Asian representation since younger audiences won’t be viewing this. Don’t try getting your kids in unless you are ready to explain very long and fleshy dildos and butt plugs. This is an adult martial arts film with a lot of laughs and imaginative action sequences and ridiculously silly science fiction situations such as a world where people have raw hotdog fingers. But the film also unpacks some serious issues within the context of the US film industry.
The plot whirls around a family of three and the film is divided into three sections: Everything, Everywhere, and All at Once. We see what seems to be a picture of them during a happy moment before the camera leads us through it and into the dim and dingy dining room. The mom, Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh), has piles of receipts on a large table in her homey living space. Evelyn and her family live in the same place where they work: a laundromat. From where she sits, Evelyn can watch the closed-circuit security cameras. Sometimes, the processed and folded laundry ends up in their very jumbled living quarters.
When she was young, Evelyn ran away with her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) against the approval of Gong Gong Wang (James Hong). Evelyn and Waymond had one child, a daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu), who is a lesbian in a committed relationship with Becky (Tallie Medel), but nothing about Joy’s demeanor expresses her name’s meaning.
Evelyn’s husband seems more hopeless than helpful. He loves putting googly eyes on things such as laundry or the broken dryer. Evelyn doesn’t have time for such silliness with the tax audit and her shaky understanding about what is considered business or personal expenses as well as the grandfather’s visit.
But before Evelyn meets with award-winning tax auditor Deirdre Beaubeirdra (Jamie Lee Curtis). Something odd happens. Her husband Waymond begins to act strangely. He tells her that he is from another dimension and she is the one who will save the world. “Evelyn, I’m not your husband. I’m another version of him from another universe. I’m here because we need your help.”
There is a great evil, Jobu Tupaki, that has jumped into multiple universes and a mission has been set to find the one version of Evelyn to save all the worlds. Waymond explains, “Remember our mission concerns the fate of every single world of our infinite multiverse.” She needs to take them back to how it was supposed to be. Every decision she has made has created a branch. “Every rejection, every disappointment has led you here to this moment. Don’t let anything distract you from it.” Although Evelyn believes she can’t be the hero the world wants, Waymond explains “it is because you’re so bad at everything” that she is capable of anything.
To go between universes, the people from alternative verse Waymond’s world (where Evelyn is dead) has developed, “verse jumping,” a way to “temporarily link your consciousness to another version of yourself, accessing all of their memories, their emotions, and even their skills.”
To verse jump, the jumper must do something improbable or silly–say “I love you” and mean it to someone trying to kill you or something as benign as eating a lip balm. In her other lives, Evelyn is a Benihana-style teppanyaki chef, a singer, a movie star, or a woman in love with Deidre with hotdog fingers in a world where feet are used like hands. There are no hotdog buns involved, but there is a bagel. After all, when you get involved in Chinese or Chinese American culture, food has to be connected somehow.
Despite this zany setup, there is a message served up between the laughs about the repercussions of even our smallest actions. The Daniels have kept the pacing tight, and the linear plot in sight despite the jumping in between worlds. Kudos to the editor and to the sound design. The film aptly displays the versatility of both Yeoh and Quan and gives Hsu a chance to be ferocious.
There’s something beautiful here about seeing Yeoh and Hsu as frumpy, in clothes that won’t catch fashion anywhere as their prime universe characters and then see how they transform with some wild costuming choices. Quan had gotten his big break at age 12 (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, 1984), but retired from acting in 2002 due to scarcity of roles. This film brings him out of retirement.
The Daniels have written and directed a film that showcases the versatility of three actors of East Asian descent and given us a glimpse at what Hollywood has been missing in their whitewashing casting or story choices. Yet Everything Everywhere All at Once is more than that. It is a chance for each of us to consider how our decisions affected the course of our lives and that of others. It’s wildly inventive and entertaining and well worth watching more than once.
Everything Everywhere All at Once made its premiere at South by Southwest (11 March 2022) and was given a limited release 25 March 2022. The film will go into wide release on 8 April 2022 by A24.
For the longer review and a discussion on how Ke Huy Quan figures in what I’ll call the Bruce Lee Litmus Test, visit my blog: AgeOfTheGeek.org.
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