Kymm Zuckert finds her perfect movie in Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)
“The universe is so much bigger than you realize.”
A few months ago, when the trailer for Everything Everywhere All At Once dropped, me and everyone I know lost their minds. This movie looked amazing, starred the great Michelle Yeoh, was about the multi-verse, and looked like it had a terribly exciting plot, but the trailer really didn’t give away anything specific. The best kind of trailer!
And the best part of it all? That was the only trailer I ever saw. They didn’t keep releasing trailer after trailer, giving away more and more, until the whole movie is ruined (I am looking at you, Free Guy, and also at you, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, that second trailer gave away too much, don’t put out a third), they just piqued our interest, then let it alone.
Evelyn, (the glorious Michelle Yeoh), is a woman unhappy in her life, a woman who wanted to be so many things, had so many dreams, and instead runs a failing laundromat with her husband, Waymond, (we will discuss the actor anon) whom she doesn’t even notice that she doesn’t connect with anymore, has a fraught relationship with her unhappy daughter, ironically named Joy, (Stephanie Hsu), is taking care of her father who always belittled her, (James Hong), and is being audited by a mean IRS auditor, (Jamie Lee Curtis, who has no ego about her looks at all, and is fantastic).
Evelyn is tight and angry, feeling boxed in and tamped down in this life that holds nothing that she ever wanted, and one day, her husband looks at her and says, “I am not your husband, I am your husband in another world, I have looked through thousands of worlds for the one Evelyn who can save everyone and everything from a great evil,” and from that moment, everything changes.
Does this sound like any superhero movie? Any Marvel film? I actually did forget it was by A24 and thought it was Marvel adjacent because of a brief shot of an animatronic raccoon in the trailer, and was like, that must be Rocket! It is not Rocket, but it it a small, terribly funny part of one of the alternate Evelyns’ lives.
Michelle Yeoh was in a supporting role in Shang-Chi earlier this year, and was fantastic, but in this film she is front and centre, in every scene, in practically every shot, if she doesn’t succeed, it doesn’t succeed. She is, of course, spectacular. She plays the absolute reality of a woman both in a life she didn’t want, and a woman seeing all the lives she could have had, a woman unfolding into the best version of herself, and also realizing that the important things about her real life are things she doesn’t want to lose. I thought when I saw Shang-Chi that I really need to get caught up with her earlier, pre-Crouching Tiger films, now I really REALLY want to do that! Supercop, here I come!
Here’s the thing, the day before I saw this film, I found out one piece of information that definitely prepared me for the film that existed, which was way more out there than I expected it to be: the writer/directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, collectively known as the Daniels, in 2016, wrote and directed a little thing called Swiss Army Man, aka the Daniel Radcliffe farting corpse movie. IYKYK.
Everything Everywhere All At Once is one of the weirdest, silliest films I have seen since, well, since Swiss Army Man, a film that I not only unexpectedly loved, but found to be profoundly moving, and this was the same, both hilarious at times, and also I just wept, sometimes at the same thing. Can a rock with googly eyes that you laughed at proceed to break your heart? It can, and did.
Another interesting comparison between the two movies, besides being willing to go out into the outer stratospheres of weirdness, is that Swiss Army Man was, at bottom, a story about a man trying desperately to make his father see him and love him for who he is, and this film is about a mother and daughter each trying to do the same in a multiplicity of universes. The Daniels’ very specific and personal genre being, parents and children trying to connect while surrounded by insanity.
Oh yeah, I mentioned the husband, above. In a cast filled with only excellent performers giving startling and layered performances, often several distinct versions of the same character, he had to do this the most often. He has at least five characters to play, working in two languages, also martial arts (did I mention the martial arts? There are many awesome fight scenes!), and he must be the emotional core of the film, his relationship with Evelyn is crucial.
Kymm Zuckert is an actor/writer/native Angelino. When Kymm was a child, her parents would take her to see anything, which means that sometimes she will see a film today and say, “I saw that when I was eight, I don’t remember any of that inappropriate sex stuff!” Check out her entire 365 day blog @ https://365filmsin365days.movie.blog