If you're looking for "I Spys," dating or LTRs, this is your scene.
View ProfilesPublished April 13, 2022 at 10:00 a.m. | Updated December 19, 2022 at 9:51 p.m.
I like to see weird shit on-screen. Risky blends of genres and tones. Head trips. So when I heard that the team behind Swiss Army Man had a new movie about a middle-aged Chinese American who learns she's the only person who can save the multiverse, I left my couch. Written and directed by Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (who collectively call themselves "Daniels"), Everything Everywhere All at Once is playing at Essex Cinemas, the Savoy Theater in Montpelier and Merrill's Roxy Cinemas in Burlington.
You think your taxes were a pain this year? Evelyn Wang (Hong Kong action icon Michelle Yeoh) faces a nightmare audit. Meanwhile, she's trying to throw a party at the struggling laundromat that she owns with her husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), while pleasing her conservative dad (James Hong), who doesn't want to know that his granddaughter (Stephanie Hsu) dates girls.
All of this happens on the same day. And that day gets even wilder when, on the way to their interview with the IRS, Waymond informs Evelyn that he's actually a different Waymond from a parallel world, come to recruit her for a mission to save the entire multiverse from destruction.
Evelyn doesn't believe him — until she starts having visions of her own alternate lives as a movie star, a top chef, an opera singer. When her formerly mild-mannered husband transforms his fanny pack into a lethal weapon, all hell breaks loose at IRS HQ. And Evelyn faces tough choices about whether existence is even worth saving.
Perhaps it's no coincidence that the title of Everything Everywhere All at Once recalls the chorus of Bo Burnham's song "Welcome to the Internet": "Could I interest you in everything? / All of the time?" We can't travel to other universes or embody our other potential selves — yet, anyway. But we can imagine the sensory overload and exhaustion that such an ability might generate, because we've all experienced jarring jumps from horrific war crimes to silly memes to earnest confessions in one five-second scroll.
Our brains weren't built to experience everything everywhere all at once, but sometimes they seem to be doing it anyway. In this movie, Daniels bottle the overwhelmingness of modern existence, on- and off-line. Even the early, realistic scenes are frenetically paced. But when Evelyn figures out how to access her other selves — including ones with action-hero powers — the movie shifts into high gear.
Daniels evoked memes in their first feature. Here, they embrace what could best be called a TikTok aesthetic. Every five- to 15-second interval brings new radical transformations of setting, costume, identity and genre, as different characters move through the multiverse's kaleidoscope.
In its relentless pacing, Everything Everywhere is less like your average indie than like a Marvel movie. In fact, its roster of producers includes Anthony and Joe Russo, who directed four of those blockbusters. But Daniels take a much funnier and ultimately more self-aware approach to their saving-the-world plot.
For one thing, the far-fetched action keeps returning to the fluorescent-lit IRS building, the least glamorous setting imaginable. To access alternate universes, the characters don't step through glowy portals. Instead, they perform statistically improbable yet absurdly banal actions such as eating lip balm or giving themselves paper cuts.
Most importantly, the movie has a solid emotional core. Before throwing its characters into the maelstrom, the screenplay takes time to establish the strain on Evelyn and Waymond's marriage, Evelyn's disappointment with her life and the ways in which she takes out that disappointment on her daughter, Joy.
Playing two formidable women, Yeoh and Hsu trade glower for glower. Quan provides a welcome counterpoint of befuddled sweetness — when he isn't kicking serious ass. Even Jamie Lee Curtis, who does a memorable turn as this movie's frumpier equivalent of Agent Smith from The Matrix, gets to have a sympathetic side.
Witty, wacky and unpredictable to the end, Everything Everywhere All at Once answers the question of how The Matrix might look if it starred crotchety middle-aged folks who are just so over the first quarter of the 21st century. Just as our attention reaches the breaking point, the filmmakers switch off all the noise and force us to confront the silence.
And what we find in those quieter scenes is real emotion. Because the villain's motive for wanting to destroy the multiverse is eminently relatable: Too much of everything all of the time can leave us wanting nothing at all.
Swiss Army Man (2016; Kanopy, Showtime, rentable): Daniels' first feature stars Daniel Radcliffe as a flatulent talking corpse who bonds with a millennial sad sack on a desert island. While "not for everyone" is an understatement here, I found it hilarious and weirdly poignant.
Being John Malkovich (1999; Kanopy, rentable): In marrying a low budget with a high concept, Daniels follow in the footsteps of Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman. The duo gave indie cinema a jolt with their first collaboration, about two losers who discover a portal into an actor's brain.
Me Myself I (1999; rentable on Vudu): Though less well known than the nearly contemporaneous Sliding Doors, this Australian drama is one of the better films about exploring an alternate life path via the multiverse.
Tags: Movie+TV Reviews, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Dan Kwan, Daniel Scheinert, Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan, James Hong, Stephanie Hsu, Staff Picks
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