It’s become increasingly rare that a Hollywood blockbuster is as intelligent as it is funny and as visually imaginative as it is deeply moving. Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s (stylized as “the Daniels”) Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) is such a film. Remarkably it’s also a film about Chinese-Americans that stars a sixty year old woman. Everything Everywhere All At Once is progressive without being self-congratulatory, it’s a special effects extravaganza that never feels phony but above all else it doesn’t shy away from actually being about something.
Despite all of the pseudo-science that fills the narrative Everything Everywhere All At Once is really a portrait of a mother. The film’s multiple dimensional plot simply services a moving examination of a woman’s relationship with herself, her husband and her daughter. The fantasy elements, both comical and violent, are nothing more than visualizations of the narrative’s dramatic subtext. The superpowers and the raccoons are, in filmic terms, equivalent within this dramatic complex to dream sequences. One of the strengths of this film is that, unlike the average comic book movie or Christopher Nolan blockbuster, Everything Everywhere All At Once doesn’t feel the need to make sense; the film doesn’t try to explain all of the “science” but rather embraces human imagination just as much as it embraces human frailties.
Everything Everywhere All At Once is more akin to It’s A Wonderful Life (1946) and Heaven Can Wait (1943) than it is to the contemporary action adventure film. The Daniels have skillfully transposed the humanist impulse of those older classics into the framework of the modern superhero movie without sacrificing any of the truths that made those classics endure. Michelle Yeoh’s character makes the same journey as James Stewart’s character but instead of an angel she has her all powerful daughter (Stephanie Hsu) as a guide. The journey is the same with each protagonist discovering their value based on their observations of a timeline in which they are something totally different or absent. Everything Everywhere All At Once, in a storm of slapstick, fantasy and spectacle, compassionately reflects on how individuals merit their own worth and the worth of others.
Even when it’s repetitive Everything Everywhere All At Once carries those essential emotional truths in the strength of the actors’ performances; from Yeoh and Hsu to Ke Huy Quan, James Hong, and Jamie Lee Curtis. Each plays their many inter-dimensional iterations as vastly different yet fundamentally the same. Yeoh is especially good and has probably given her career defining performance in this film.
