Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert (2022)
Forewarned of a ‘maximalist assault on the senses’ (milkteafilms.com), I chickened out of taking on this absurdist-sci-fi-fantasy-martial-arts-comedy-drama in the cinema. Everything Everywhere All at Once is such a hit, though – critically and commercially – that I felt I should try it on Curzon Home Cinema, pressing pause whenever things got optically or sonically punishing. Written and directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert – who style themselves ‘Daniels’ – the film is set in present-day California though not only there. The location of Everything (as I’ll usually call it) is the multiverse. The heroine, Evelyn Quan Wang (Michelle Yeoh), runs a laundromat with her husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), in the town of Simi Valley but Daniels’ story spins Evelyn on a voyage through parallel lives in parallel worlds.
The hectic activity of the opening scenes – in the laundromat and the Wangs’ home (they live above the shop) – is overdone but the set-up is essentially realistic. Michelle Yeoh, with a convincingly careworn look, has a nice blend of energy and exhaustion as multi-tasking Evelyn. She’s preparing a party in honour of her elderly father (James Hong), recently arrived from Hong Kong. She’s trying unavailingly to keep on top of paperwork for the Wangs’ struggling business. She’s doing her best to accept that her daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), is in a same-sex relationship. As if this weren’t enough, meek, geeky Waymond is, surprisingly, trying to serve Evelyn divorce papers. It’s not until the couple reports to the local offices of the Internal Revenue Service, however, that Everything goes into hyperactive overdrive.
In the lift taking them to a showdown with an IRS inspector, Waymond temporarily ‘changes’ into Alpha Waymond, his alter ego in a world he calls the ‘Alphaverse’. ‘Changes’ is in inverted commas because Waymond’s body is unaltered physically and his personality doesn’t seem much different either. When the lift arrives at the appointed floor, the Wangs first squeeze into a janitor’s cubicle, where Waymond informs Evelyn (I’ll hand to Wikipedia rather than attempt my own précis):
‘… that many parallel universes exist, since every choice made creates a new universe. The people of the Alphaverse, led by the late Alpha Evelyn, developed “verse-jumping” technology that allows people to access the skills, memories, and body of their parallel universe counterparts by fulfilling specific conditions. The multiverse is being threatened by Jobu Tupaki, the Alphaverse version of Joy. Her mind was splintered after Alpha Evelyn pushed her to extensively verse-jump; Jobu Tupaki now experiences all universes at once and can verse-jump and manipulate matter at will. With her godlike power she has created a black hole-like “everything bagel” that can potentially destroy the multiverse.’
Waymond’s load of exposition means, in terms of immediate action, that Evelyn, during the interview with tax inspector Deirdre Beaubeirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis), is transformed to the extent of knocking this fearsome bureaucrat out of her chair with a punch to the nose. IRS security men arrive in response to Deirdre’s call for help and a kung fu-ish set-to, which also favours thwacks to noses, ensues. This is obviously a drop in the ocean of what happens in Everything, and I’ve no idea how typical it is of what follows. In a parallel life, I may have continued watching. In this one, I fast forwarded to the final minutes, which at least puts Daniels’ extravaganza in the exalted company of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980).
Stylised as it is, I didn’t like the mayhem in the IRS building. A light flickers on and off in the janitor’s cupboard as Waymond explains things to Evelyn. But neither the violence nor its feared visual dynamism made me give up on Everything (even though plenty more of both might have had the same effect eventually). I was just embarrassed by the overdone playing, especially from Jamie Lee Curtis, and bored by jokes like Deirdre’s zany rhyming surname. The film’s box-office success is all the more remarkable in view of its certification – R in North America (‘for some violence, sexual material and language’), 15 over here (‘strong violence, sex references, language’). It seems a shame to keep pre-teen viewers away from cinema as show-off puerile as this.
1 September 2022
