Film review: Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

This film does a skillful job of disguising the fact that it's about family dynamics and is essentially a stage play with five characters (plus some cannon, or rather, kick-and-punch fodder), a mother (Michelle Yeoh, whom we first saw in the early 90s in Police Story III), father (Ke Huy Quan, famously a child actor ("Short Round" in the second Indiana Jones and The Asian One in the inexplicably beloved The Goonies) who vanished from Hollywood pretty much until this film), daughter (the excellent Stephanie Hsu), maternal grandfather (the ubiquitous James Hong (Chinatown, Blade Runner, among many others)) and the misanthropic IRS agent auditing them (Jamie Leigh Curtis, hilarious).  

One might say this film is like one of Leibniz's monads, in that it packs, not just the universe, but the multiverse into this drama.  The fact that this is a simple, sweet (for Thomas, who watched it when it came out, too sweet) story about a middle-aged mother's existential crisis (with her relationships to the other three pulling her in all different directions) can be lost amidst the sci-fi and slapstick humor.  Reviewers said that it was like nothing else, but if I had to pick a spiritual sibling, it would be something by Michel Gondry, who also likes very much handmade-looking fantasmagorica, and most especially his best film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which has similar themes of regret and a couple finding each other again and again, also wrapped up in a science-fiction sugar-coating.  

In this case, the fantasy element is that there are infinite other-world counterparts to our heroine Evelyn Wang, all of whom seem to have done better than her fate of having paired up with her sweet but a bit hapless husband Waymond, only to move to America and take over the run-down dry cleaners that is being audited (I can think of a lot worse fates, to be honest), and give birth to Joy, the now mid-twenties college-dropout lesbian (a fact Evelyn is determined to keep from the father that kicked her out but who is now visiting from China) daughter.  But the fact that she took the wrong turn at every life-juncture means (somehow) that she is the best suited to solve the problem plaguing the multiverse, that of the world-destroying being Jobu Tupaki (whose name Evelyn can never seem to get right).  She has a connection, in that Jobu Tupaki was created by her "alpha" world counterpart, who discovered how hop (at least mentally) between worlds, and tried to train her daughter, but ended up driving her insane with the knowledge that everything that she could ever do has been done in some world, and so, in a sense, nothing matters.  Her first introduction to the notion of world hopping comes when they (she, Waymond and her father "Gong Gong," who cannot be left alone) are going up in the elevator to their IRS appointment and the alpha-world version of Waymond takes over her Waymond's body (in a process which Evelyn later tries to explain to Waymond and Joy by analogy with Ratatouille, but instead describes in terms of raccoons, and calls Raccacoonie (a scenario that ends up playing out on one of the parallel worlds, perhaps the funniest part of the film)) and demonstrates his extreme kung fu skills with Waymond's bum bag.  

However, she is distracted by how badly the audit is going (Jamie Leigh Curtis (Deirdre) is threatening to have the business repossessed), which detracts from her lessons in world-hopping.  This turns out to require doing something especially random to trigger it, which will enable you to link up with a version of yourself that has skills relevant to your current predicament.  (You can apparently either bring those skills back to your world, but still be you, or take over their body in their world, as with the Waymonds.  The logic is not entirely consistent.)  At various times Evelyn takes over a version of herself who dumped Waymond but stayed in China and trained in kung fu, only to become a film star (like the real Michelle Yeoh), a singer, a chef (whose rival is only as good as he is because of the raccoon under his hat), 

and somebody who stands on a street corner spinning a sign (surely that's the worst-off Evelyn?).  Oh, and a version of hers who has floppy mustard (or cheese wizz?)-filled hot-dog fingers 

who is being amorously pursued by a Deirde counterpart (that might be the funniest world - particularly because the fingers are useless so everything has to be done with your feet (the touch that in this world Deirdre has a carpal-tunnel sleeve on her foot had us lol-ing - that and the scene where Evelyn brushes a tear from Deirde's cheek with her foot)).

Anyway, there's an awful lot of world-jumping, and Michelle Yeoh has to undergo a myriad of costume and makeup changes, and there's "google- eyes" and a universe where life hasn't evolved, so Evelyn and Joy just become rocks, and communicate in subtitles.  

But Joy/Jobu has set a multiverse-ending event in motion, because she's created a bagel with everything on it (for our non-US reader(s), that usually means poppy seeds, sesame seeds, salt and possibly some cheese, but here it means literally everything, which turns it into a super-massive gravity sinkhole, and the alpha-world version of Gong Gong is determined to kill her to save everything.  Should Evelyn help him?

Definitely entertaining, although it has the new-Doctor-Who problem of ratcheting everything up to (multiple) universe(s)-threatening levels, which I always think is less effective than smaller-scale stakes, and it does get a bit repetitive towards the end.  However, every one of the five principals deserved all the plaudits, along with, in particular, the two heavies whose method of triggering their world-jumping was to ram large objects up their respective arses, 

and a welcome cameo for Jenny Slate (whom Evelyn kept calling "big nose").