A Silver Screen Affair

Everything Everywhere All At Once

“Everything Everywhere All At Once” is a 2022 Absurdist Comedy Drama by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Schienert, the writer/director duo best known as the Daniels. It premiered at the South By Southwest Festival in March 2022 before it’s general release on April 8th 2022. The Daniels started writing the screenplay circa 2016. Apparently, Jackie Chan was initially intended to play the lead role, something that was changed during the writing process. Thankfully, the filming was wrapped up before the initial COVID outbreak.

“Everything” features Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan as married couple Evelyn and Waymond Wang. Stephanie Hsu and James Hong play Joy Wang, their daughter, and Gong Gong, Evelyn’s father. Tallie Medel and Jamie Lee Curtis round out the cast as Joy’s girlfriend, Becky, and Deirdre, an IRS auditor, respectively.

Evelyn has it rough. Her and Waymond struggle to run a laundromat while trying to care for their aging father and maintain their dying relationship with their daughter. If that isn’t enough, the couple is now being audited by the IRS – and THIS is where Evelyn’s world starts to breakdown, quite literally. Through the people around her, entities from other universes inform her that a being known as Jobu Tupaki is threatening all of existence and that she may be everyone’s only hope.

I LOVE “Everything Everywhere All At Once”. But I’m not going to lie to you. I wasn’t kidding about the “Absurdist” in “Absurdist Comedy Drama”. The aesthetic cohesion seems to just unravel at times, usually when Jobu Tupaki is present. I’ve seen it described as Dada-esque and I can’t help but agree as Jobu is essentially an anti-social force that cares little for decorum or whatever semblance of order there is, bending the world around them to their will. It’s a girl dressed like a runway model, stepping out of an elevator walking a pig and smoking a cigarette. It’s the same girl lecturing an incredulous police officer on the difference between “can” and “not allowed to” only to make their head pop into (literal) confetti a few seconds later. It’s someone appearing in the middle of the road wearing bright green boas and gaudy shades and flipping a van. It’s falling through your couch into another universe. Furthermore, the Daniels bring some of the body absurdity and raunchiness that informed their “Turn Down For What” music video to this production as well. Even the more grounded Verse-Jumping ability, the ability to read the memories of and mimic the traits of an alternate version of you, comes with absurd dares you have to complete to even make the link in the first place. I’m talking things that range from giving yourself papercuts between the fingers to drinking a whole 2 liter of soda to humping a lamp.

It’s weird. It’s loopy. It doesn’t make sense – but that’s the thing: It doesn’t have to. Considering we’re talking about a multiverse with a reality warper, I’d say it isn’t SUPPOSED to. “Everything Everywhere All At Once” is so amazing, despite that, because it has heart. Like my old favorite, FLCL, it takes all of the those silly, weird and confounding elements and makes them about something. It pulls no punches, getting a few laughs out of the rather blunt truths of “The grass IS greener over there (in the other universe)” and “Everything IS meaningless” – sentiments many works would likely dismiss offhand. All At Once does something better, it gets irreverent. It essentially says “So What?”. Watching Evelyn channel the knowledge and attitudes of those around her, even Jobu Tupaki and Waymond (of all people), and how that affects all of the various timelines is a sight to behold. No, seriously, Waymond stands up, shifts the paradigm and just runs off with the show multiple times- and I LOVE it.

My initial impressions of “Everything Everywhere All At Once” was that we were going to be getting something akin to Jet Li’s “The One” – and we did, but I’d say we got so much more (I’m sorry Mr. Li, please don’t punch my spine out of my body). Whereas Multiverse of Madness (sorry, comparisons are inevitable) peddles in a more conventional brand of Sam Raimi weirdness, All at Once runs on an aesthetic absurdity that doesn’t quite go down as easily. What it lacks in conventional imagery, though, it makes up for with its sheer emotional punch.

And it’s for that reason that I recommend you see this movie. When was the last time a scene about a couple of rocks made you cry? For that matter, when was the last time a movie made you question something as innocuous as an Everything Bagel?