Friday, April 29, 2022

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022, R)

My movie-theater-going habits have changed a lot since the start of the pandemic. In the before times, I probably went to the movies twice a month on average, but now, I’ve been to the theaters precisely six times since they’ve reopened. There are still movies coming out that I otherwise would’ve definitely gone out to see, but now that I need to stalk my theater app for sparsely-attended showings and prepare to wear my KN95 for 2+ hours, I’ve reevaluated what it takes to get me into a movie theater. Until now, it’s just been Marvel stuff, mainly because, aside from being movies I wanted to see, I also knew it’d be tough to dodge spoilers until they arrived on digital. Everything Everywhere All at Once is the first non-MCU film of the pandemic that really made me say, “I don’t want to wait to watch that.”

Nothing in Evelyn Wang’s life seems to go right. The family laundromat is struggling (and being audited!), her skittish husband Waymond is unhappy in their marriage, and her relationship with her daughter Joy is rocky due to Evelyn holding Joy’s girlfriend at arm’s length. But in the middle of one crappy, disappointing day, her life is turned completely upside-down when a Waymond from a parallel universe “verse-jumps” into her husband’s body with a dire warning: the entire multiverse is at stake and she, Evelyn the laundromat owner under audit with the troubled home life, is the only one who can save it. Under the direction of this other Waymond, Evelyn learns to tap into the skills of other Evelyns across the multiverse, glimpsing countless dreams she had for herself coming true in other lifetimes.

This is a wild movie. Totally bonkers, with all the confetti, sex toys, and googly eyes to prove it. There’s a universe where everyone has hot dogs instead of fingers, and at one point, a character wears what appear to be teddy-bear sleeves. The way Evelyn and parallel-universe Waymond access the abilities of their multiversal selves (i.e., kung fu, hibachi) is kind of the inverse of the Infinite Improbability Drive from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Whereas the drive in Hitchhiker’s Guide causes wildly-improbable things to occur as a byproduct of realizing faster-than-light speed, Evelyn and other more seasoned verse-jumpers slingshot their consciousness around their personal multiverse map by doing wildly-improbable things (i.e., eating a chunk of chap stick, blowing air on someone’s nose.) There are plenty of moments where all you can do is strap yourself in and hang on for the ride.

But despite all the ludicrous goings-on, it’s also a surprisingly intimate story about a middle-aged woman longing for the lives she never lived but finding a new appreciation for her own in the process. Interacting with other Waymonds causes Evelyn to look at her Waymond differently, and her experiences give a different weight to her struggles to relate to her daughter. Saving the multiverse, obviously, is both pressing and necessary, but so is mending things with her family.

Michelle Yeoh is every bit as gloriously awesome as you would expect in this film, playing Evelyn and her various multiversal selves. She’s a licensed badass, she’s effortlessly funny, and she’s searingly emotional. Just as excellent, though, is Ke Huy Quan (Data from The Goonies,) making quite the comeback after a long break from acting. It’s great to watch Quan slip in and out of the different Waymond identities, offering up several very distinct leading men in one performance. Stephanie Hsu, who played Christine in Be More Chill, doesn’t have as broad a range of material in her role as Joy, but she’s still excellent as the hurting young woman looking for restitution. The film also features, Jamie Lee Curtis, the always-welcome James Hong, a brief appearance from Jenny Slate, and a very fun Harry Shum Jr.

Warnings

Violence, sexual references (including sex toys and quick shots of BDSM,) language, drinking/smoking, and thematic elements.

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