Everything, Everywhere, All at Once (2022)
On magic, multiverses, and the Daniels' maximalist ode to love, sweet love
Getting a review out is a good way to start a month, if I do say so myself. If you’re interested in more, do hit that subscribe button.
We come to this place for magic.
So begins the familiar and oft-memed Nicole Kidman monologue that precedes every feature screened at an AMC theater. Most times, its overt earnestness comes off as dissonant and cornball, particularly when it’s prologuing the sort of forgettable schlock that plague cinemas during the first few months of the year. As someone who has sat through his fair share of forgettable schlock in theaters over the years, I sometimes feel like I come to this place more out of blind faith that this time, I might just feel something.
But as Everything, Everywhere, All at Once—the latest offering from Swiss Army Man directors Daniels Scheinert and Kwan—shows, sometimes the movies can still be magic.
This magic begins with Michelle Yeoh—as legendary a screen presence as they come—giving perhaps the best “traditional” (i.e., non-kung-fu) performance of her career. It is the sort of performance only a capital-S Star could give, one that is inextricably built on the ghosts of the many faces they’ve worn over the years. You can read an entire cinematic history in Yeoh’s turn as the beaten-down Evelyn, and her most impressive acting here might be how she’s able to both play a character that both subverts and reinforces her image as a stone-cold badass, sometimes even simultaneously. It’s unfortunate that this film isn’t the kind that normally gets awards recognition, because I’ll be shocked if I see three better performances this year.
Around her, the Daniels build a vast crisscrossing web of characters and universes that are all in themselves echoes of other things. Ke Huy Quan (Short Round!) and James Hong are inspired casting choices for Evelyn’s husband and father respectively, themselves bringing the baggage of their most famous roles to their characters here. The alternate universes we see are a mishmash of homages, ranging from the relatively subtle (the pitch-perfect Wong Kar-Wai riff shot in In the Mood for Love tones, employing Chungking Express staggered motion, and even drenching Quan’s hair in Tony Leung levels of pomade) to the abjectly silly (I won’t spoil these, but raccoons are involved), and even the main universe gives Yeoh ample opportunity to remind us of the logic-defying urban-wuxia derring-do that made her a legend.
The great trick is that very little of this feels like a cheap nostalgia grab, but a sincere attempt at wrangling the measure of a lived life by taking the life of a fictional woman who achieved none of her dreams and mapping it onto the career of the actress playing her, one of the most accomplished figures in the history of moving pictures. It’s all very meta, but in a way that attempts to build towards some end that transcends time and space itself. Even if the film does arrive at a fairly mawkish conclusion to these proceedings, the sheer scale of its ambition makes it difficult to fault it for its bent towards maximalist sincerity.
If anything, the film’s weakest points are when it feels the need to undercut its earnestness by overdoing it with the silliness. The Daniels’ conceit of introducing ostensibly comedic elements before refashioning them for emotional resonance is hit-or-miss, and the way they rattle off the payoffs for these in the last act feels both perfunctory and almost self-congratulatory. One can imagine how unwieldy this script was, that the ending has the look of the Daniels simply cutting the Gordian knot. When the first 110 minutes of the film consistently delights and surprises, it’s easier to forgive the last 30 minutes for being a little more mundane and almost a little exhausting.
So it isn’t perfect, but that’s almost fitting, given the themes the movie traffics in. The volatility of a mother-daughter relationship—Stephanie Hsu is electric here as Yeoh’s daughter Joy and is a talent to watch—is complex enough on its own before you add on Evelyn being an immigrant and Joy being queer. In many ways, this film would make a rewarding double-feature with Alice Wu’s 2004 film Saving Face, which likewise uses genre conventions (albeit nowhere near the sheer bombast with which the Daniels do here) to explore these exact complications, but through the vantage point of the daughter. That film has a bit of a amare ex machina ending to it too, but in both cases, it works better than you’d think.
During its best moments, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once is a reminder of all that movies can be. It is a big, bold, and messy celebration of big, bold, and messy emotions, and if it occasionally slips into sop, that just feels like the price a film that relentlessly swings for the fences must pay. It is an unabashed showcase for and love letter to its lead actor, as well as to the power and potential of cinema and the stories told through it.
After all what is cinema but a place where we can visit the lives we could have led, and in seeing them, be not just entertained but somehow reborn?