Everything Everywhere All at Once [Media Notes 72]

I loved it! But first, I had to go to a theater to see it, a live in person in the round movie theatre. Which was OK. The theater had been revamped with recliner seats and they aren’t all that comfortable, especially for a film that clocks in at over two hours.

And what a movie! Zowie! Does it ever zip around. It is exactly that, Everything Everywhere All at Once. It begins in an apartment above a laundromat in the world you and I are familiar with, but with hints of something else. And then it moves into the multiverse, which is not to be confused with the metaverse. This is no Ready Player One, zipping back a forth between meat space and virtual space in a more or less coherent manner. No, the multiverse is different, all universes at once, with the characters living their lives simultaneously in all of them. But there is some leakage between them.

There’s plenty of martial arts tomfoolery, as you might expect in a film starring Michelle Yeoh. But for all the bling and fling across the galaxies, this isn’t a martial arts movie, nor a science fiction movie. It’s a family melodrama. Here’s what A.O. Scott says:

... it’s a bittersweet domestic drama, a marital comedy, a story of immigrant striving and a hurt-filled ballad of mother-daughter love.

At the center of it all is Evelyn Wang, played by the great Michelle Yeoh with grace, grit and perfect comic timing. Evelyn, who left China as a young woman, runs a laundromat somewhere in America with her husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan). Her life is its own small universe of stress and frustration. Evelyn’s father (James Hong), who all but disowned her when she married Waymond, is visiting to celebrate his birthday. An I.R.S. audit looms. Waymond is filing for divorce, which he says is the only way he can get his wife’s attention. Their daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), has self-esteem issues and also a girlfriend named Becky (Tallie Medel), and Evelyn doesn’t know how to deal with Joy’s teenage angst or her sexuality.

But it takes a while for that to reveal itself amid all the world hopping.

As a big Ratatouille fan I especially appreciated the ongoing riff on that, a chef with a racoon on his head puppet-mastering his actions. Who knows what else is being riffed up on. There’s also segments where two rocks sit high on a cliff and think to one another. And the animated child’s drawings. The piñatas.

You get the idea.

Go see for yourself – but avoid the recliner seats if you can.