Starring: Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, James Hong, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tallie Medel, Jenny Slate and Harry Shum Jr
Distributor: Roadshow Films
Runtime: 137 mins. Reviewed in Apr 2022
Reviewer: Fr Peter Malone msc
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Starting with ordinary life, we venture into the multiverse. So does Evelyn, proprietor of a coin laundry who is challenged to live a variety of lives that might have been. Imaginative, exciting, bewildering – a wild and weird ride.
Judging by reviews, bloggers, box office, everyone, everywhere, is wanting to watch this film all at once. And, if you decide to see it, you are in for what they usually call a wild ride. Perhaps it might be better to say wild, weird ride.
Before we get to everywhere, there has to be a where. It is as prosaic as a coin laundry, managed by Evelyn (the ever-versatile Yeoh) and Waymond (former child star Quan). Evelyn is busy, busy, busy, Waymond worried, thinking of a divorce. They have a visit from their daughter, Joy (Hsu), who brings her girlfriend, Becky, exasperated by the hold her mother has over her. And, upstairs, there is Gong Gong, Evelyn’s father (Hong filming at age 80). So, prospects of a lively domestic drama – compounded when they go off to the IRS building with their tax documentation, encountering severe auditor Deidre (Curtis).
But, then the first part of the title comes up on screen, Everything. And, off we go, barely stopping for another two hours of screen time. The two Daniels, writers and directors Kwan and Scheinert, came into some prominence with their The Swiss Army Man, but they have made a number of short films and videos. They bring all their talents from these backgrounds, a non-stop kaleidoscope of ideas and images and music. (So far, the film has received one award – for Best Editing, Paul Rogers – heartily endorsed by this reviewer, wondering how it worked in the editing room with hundreds of short pieces to be edited coherently.) Coherently might be an overstatement but, as we watch the film, it is pacey, exciting, sometimes breathtaking, and unexpectedly works well.
So, off into the multiverse, relying on our familiarity with strange powers in the universe, gizmos for mind control, exciting special effects, and always the unexpected. At one stage, one of the characters remarks in an understatement, not typical of the whole dynamic of the film, ‘I’m a little lost’. And, this is an Odyssey in the multiverse for Evelyn, showing Yeoh’s multi-versatility, serious, dramatic, some martial arts, music, a bewildered mother facing so many of the possible lives she might have led, trying to work out which life she is in, especially with her husband turns up in all kinds of guises, the quiet man at the laundry, a dapper suit and tie gentleman, touches of the android.
And then there is Joy who is cast as the villain. As the film progresses, we come to understand this is a film about family reconciliation, regrets, Evelyn confronting Gong Gong as an evil power and memories of a harsh father, Joy and emotional rivalry.
After about an hour of this, the second part of the title comes up on screen, Everywhere. That is rather misleading because, in fact, we have already been Everywhere. And, it is more of the same, in the different universes, Evelyn’s sudden changing lives, encountering her family in different guises, conflict, resolution, possibilities.
And, by the way, the tax auditor turns up quite a deal, initially fighting with Evelyn, finally becoming reconciled and friends – and a pleasure to see Jamie Lee Curtis again.
When the third part of the title appears on screen, All at Once, it is almost the end of the film, quietening, reminding us that whatever our existential imaginations might conjure, whatever our cosmology of the universes, we live here, and have to live our lives in our here and now limitations.
Safe to say you won’t find many more films (any films?) like this.
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