Review: Everything Everywhere All at Once

Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) runs a laundromat with her meek husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan). Her lesbian daughter (Stephanie Hsu) is fed up with her mother’s criticism, embarrassment, and disapproval. With the business undergoing an audit, the Wang family venture to the office of frumpy IRS auditor Deirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis) and that’s when things get weird. Waymond is overtaken by what he says is another version of himself in what he calls the multiverse and has come to tell Evelyn that all hell has broken loose in the multiverse and only Evelyn can put a stop to it. James Hong plays the Wong family patriarch, who has become largely senile.

 

For this 2022 Best Picture Oscar winner, writer-director team Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert have taken elements of “Donnie Darko”, “Parasite”, author Douglas Adams’s books, “Being John Malkovich” and combined them (among other influences) to create something wholly different and completely bonkers. Yes it’s overlong, flawed, and perhaps even overly ambitious, but I’d rather that than something safe and underdone. It’s not as great of a film as I wanted it to be – it sags at times – but it’s unusual, interesting, and enjoyable. Even when I wasn’t necessarily able to grasp what I was watching, I was still enjoying it.

 

Michelle Yeoh and the welcome return of Ke Huy Quan deservingly won Oscars but I gotta go against the online grain here and say Jamie Lee Curtis thoroughly deserved her Oscar win too, and actually stole the show for me. She’s clearly having a whale of a time here and is a real hoot. At one point Curtis (or her stunt performer) dropkicks Ke Huy Quan, and this 80s child was in nostalgic heaven. Laurie Strode dropkicking Data from “The Goonies”, ladies and gents. I’ve got no problem with legacy Oscars when the performance is still as enjoyable as Curtis’. Also, those are some very interestingly shaped and presumably multi-purpose trophies that Curtis’ character displays.

 

I wasn’t overly keen on the film’s rather backwards stance on queerness. The film isn’t homophobic or transphobic (nor are the characters, at heart), but Stephanie Hsu’s lesbian character spends a good portion of the film essentially as a kind of mentally unbalanced antagonist, which is a bit of an uncomfortable and outdated stereotype. I understood that the filmmakers likely had good intentions so I hung in there, assuming they’d stick the landing. Yet when we get to that destination, the overall lesson being learned by the main character here is seemingly one of tolerating her daughter’s ‘messiness’. So even when the film arrives at the right destination…it’s to a degree that is still behind the times. Apparently homosexuality (or being transgender, I think all the colours of the rainbow apply here) is ‘messy’ and it’s OK to be a mess according to the filmmakers. Well golly gee, thanks for that slightly condescending moral from 1999. I’m sorry but that kind of attitude was well outdated in 2002 let alone in 2022 when the film was made. In most societies I think we’ve long moved on from tolerance to overall acceptance now from the vast majority (at least with homosexuality. The transgender community might still have a ways to go unfortunately), though I understand we’re dealing with an immigrant subset of Asian-America here and there may be some lag there. Still, it felt in that one aspect that I was watching a film from a slightly earlier, less enlightened time.

 

Too much movie perhaps, and I’m not sure its view of LGBTQ issues is terribly progressive for our time, but I gotta say this one’s an original and it’s well-acted across the board. So far as Asian cinema goes, it’s more “The Seventh Curse” than “Red Sorghum” or “Farewell My Concubine”. I didn’t love this film but I sure found it interesting and it wouldn’t surprise me if I warmed to it even more on repeat viewings. 

 

Rating: B-