Review 672: Everything Everywhere All at Once

  

Everything Everywhere All at Once is outrageous, messy, lavishly crafted and tones of fun to watch.

Evelyn Quan Wang (Michelle Yoah) is a Chinese-American imigrant who owns a laundormat which becomes audited by the IRS. During a meeting at the IRS, Evelyn becomes embroiled in a confrontation where she must connect with parrallel universe versions of herself to prevent a powerful being from destroting the multiverse.

Even though Evelyn appears to having a smiling and happy relationship with her husband but their marrige seems to have gone south and they don't have the spark that they once had.

There is plenty of hectic action sequences, fights and violence to go around but they aren't really the point. They're mearly the iceing on the cake while the real emotional core of the film is on Evelyn

The multiverse acts as a metaphor for Imigration. 

Existentialism: Over the course of the film, we see Evelyn pondering the branched paths her life could've taken.

Nihilism is incorporated into the films exploration of Asian American Identity. 

Absurdism:

Asian American Identity: As the Washington Post put it "To be an Immigrant is to live in a fractured multiverse." The Daniels draw from a long history of Asians in America and notable Asian American issues, from the Wang family's laundromat which recalls the long, exclusionary of Chinese immigrant labor to the Western romance with Kung fu mysticism to the "model minority" myth to the figure of the tiger mother. The film, invokes, individulizes, multiplies and then   Evelyn Wang gets cast and recast as multiple variants of herself, insiting the on the connections between these multiple personas: the engrossed businesswoman, the kung fu master, the exhausted wife, the chanteuse, the tiger mom, the filial-and-failed duaghter, the gifted mind-traveler and film star giving Yoah plenty of room to show off her range. The film, creatively and intelligently uses these multiversal divagations to imagine alternative lives and versions of them.

With a runtime of 140 minutes, Everything Everywhere All at Once certainly packs in a lot to point of exhausting. It's too much of a muchness for me at times but then again, a lot of rewarding things are.

Daniels' direction is unobtrusive, lighting up the screen with jawdropping imagery, the cinematography is gorgeous, the score by Son Lux is majestic. 

Michelle Yoah delivers one of her best performances in rencent years playing Evelyn Quan Wang. Evelyn is the emotional anchor of the film, giving her the opportunity   Evelyn's life is its own universe of stress and frustration 

I only just realised that Ke Huy Quan also played Short Round in 1984's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom 

Jamie Lee Curtis

Stephanie Hsu

3.5/5

The Anonymous Critic.