Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

A visual whirlwind aims straight for your heart and mind

Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn Wang assumes multiple identities in Everything Everywhere All at Once

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

This kaleidoscopic movie spills, splashes and surges across the screen.  It’s a multi-dimensional visual spectacle that requires the closest attention, but you’ll be fine if you stay focused on its three most involving characters.

At the center is Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh), a Chinese American who, with her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), owns a busy laundromat.  The business seems to be thriving, but as the movie opens Evelyn is surveying her desk strewn with bills and financial records, and her face is anxiously screwed up as she tries to bring order to the chaos before her.

She and Waymond are scrambling to prepare for a tricky audit appointment with the IRS.  Evelyn’s irascible father Gong Gong (James Hong) has arrived from China, and a birthday celebration is planned for him, which Evelyn is trying to make festive.  But the old man is such a crank she can’t work up much enthusiasm for the project.

She’s also going through emotional turmoil with her adult daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu), who is in love with another woman, Becky (Tallie Mendel), and intent on winning her family’s acceptance. But even if Joy’s mother and father were able to accept a same-sex relationship, the bigoted Gong Gong clearly won’t.  In any case Evelyn can’t bridge the frosty distance between herself and her daughter.

For Evelyn, keeping bonds of affection with her patient, sweet-tempered husband, who’s fiercely loyal but has little business sense, is hard enough.  Trying to understand the rebellious Joy is pushing Evelyn over the edge.  When the family goes to meet with the IRS agent, Deidre Beaubeirdra (a nearly unrecognizable, and very good, Jamie Lee Curtis), the movie explodes into full-blown fantasy.

Before we quite understand what’s going on, Evelyn and Waymond are wielding pieces of office equipment like samurai swords, threatening the IRS staff.  Security officers arrive only to turn into back-flipping, leg-flinging Asian martial arts opponents.  Evelyn and Waymond are performing physical feats so grand and commanding that we can’t imagine how they’ve summoned such staggering combative skills.

We soon get an explanation.  They’re not entirely who they seem.  In the midst of the mayhem, Waymond is mysteriously outfitted with a pulsing, green-lit earpiece, emitting a doom-filled voice whispering harsh commands to him.  He briefly pulls Evelyn aside to reveal his other self, who’s from, literally, another universe:  the Alpha Universe.  This version of Waymond assuredly is not weak-willed, and his assignment from Alpha is to show Evelyn how she can take on the world and win.  

She can be reconciled not only with the IRS, but with her husband, daughter, father and, perhaps most importantly, the other “possible” lives she might have lived in alternate universes.  As the movie goes on, the other family members, as well as the IRS agent, are also outfitted with the mysterious earpieces – and transformed personalities. They continue to move back and forth between who they are and the alternative selves they might be or might have been.  Yet they all still contend with their ordinary Earthbound fears, doubts and longings.

Stephanie Hsu, Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan as a frightened family in Everything Everywhere All at Once

If all of this sounds like sensory overload, I can only say: buckle up.  It’s not always easy to follow.  We see Evelyn become a glamorous actress, a monkish religious acolyte, a highly skilled chef preparing Japanese cuisine, and still more counter selves.  One is a knife-wielding avenger who seems about to attack both husband and daughter – though she comes to her senses just in time – all the while remaining the deeply sad wife and mother we know her to be, trying to restore calm to her family.

Waymond is allowed to take on other identities, too, most notably in another lifetime as the handsome, understanding husband to Evelyn’s celebrated movie star.  They’re a childless couple in a parallel universe who nonetheless seem to know of the Evelyn and Waymond who married young in China, moved to America, quickly became parents to Joy, and opened a laundry business.

The movie intercuts these separate identities and lifetimes with lightning speed.  The astoundingly supple editing is by Paul Rogers; the dizzying, often game-like cinematography is by Larkin Seiple.  If we’re sometimes lost, we’re given reminders that all the shifting identities, some arriving from galaxies far away, are still the Evelyn, Wayman, Joy, and IRS agent we first met.

It’s clear the movie is impressing on us the undeniable fact that we don't choose our identities.  We can only find ways to accept or even embrace them.  That, finally, is this head-spinning tale’s plainspoken, unremarkable truth.  It’s given sharp resonance by the superb acting throughout.

Yeoh is a marvel, as Evelyn swerves to see what’s at stake for her at each stage in her multiple lives.  The actress amazes because through all the shifting backgrounds and countless costume changes, we still see Evelyn’s ongoing dilemmas unwinding right within Yeoh’s sparkling eyes.  We never lose sight of the woman who’s fighting to be understood, and it’s impossible not to root for her even if she’s often not sure who she is or ought to be.

Quan as Waymond, the gentle, apparently simple-minded husband Evelyn calls “silly” in front of nearly everyone, keeps devotion and decency at the heart of his performance.  Except, of course, when he acts as an agent for the Alpha Universe, whose leaders micromanage him and the others from deep space.  Quan handles Waymond’s double identity deftly, and his essential goodness as Waymond always eventually rises to the surface.  This is most true in a wrenching scene where he tearfully insists that our only salvation is “to be kind” to each other.

As she struggles to make her family understand her love for a woman, Tsu as Joy is deeply affecting.  But it’s even more important for Joy to be able to believe she’s a vital part of her mother's life, which she’s always doubted.  In one depiction of this standoff, the two women become a pair of rocks on a distant planet that doesn’t support biological life, and their “dialogue” is printed for us on screen.  The episode’s finale is so stirring and unexpected that we feel the story reaching for transcendence and damn near making it – by way of a pair of rocks on screen!

Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert are the movie’s co-directors and co-screenwriters, and this is their second feature together. Known as “The Daniels”, here they’re consumed by, almost afflicted with, their singular vision.  It’s a frenzied yet keenly disciplined near-apocalyptic imagining that makes a lone family stand for all of us. 

We, the human species, are deeply flawed and could end badly.  For all of our so-called good intentions, we can excel at wounding and trying to wipe out one another.  At the same time, we can do better – but only by soaking up those few interludes when we’re truly together, at one and at peace, fleeting as such moments may be.

This is a headlong trip of a movie, hallucinatory, breathtakingly fast, and shocking, in both jarring and tender ways, in the vividness of its imagery.  The blood we see feels real.  But when people develop hot dogs for fingers and therefore become good at playing piano with their feet, our adjusting to altered realities, accepting who we can be, feels equally urgent and compelling.  Can we get closer to one another?  Yes, the movie says.  Do we dare?  Surely not often enough.

Chaos, confusion and clutter are actually brilliant disguises, entrapment devices and hiding places.   But in sorting through them you can win your actual life.  To do it, you're going to have to pick up a sword, metaphorical, to be sure, and fight for it.  Living is a continual mess.  You never completely clean it up.  You get caught up in the spin, and grab hold of those alongside you who are also aching for a surcease of sorrow.  You can actually achieve that, however provisionally, if only you will listen to and really hear them.