A bonkers of a movie to fall in love with
After watching Everything Everywhere All At Once (EEAAO from now on), I want to watch Daniels’ earlier movie, Swiss Army Man. The premise of that movie is something along these lines.
A man finds himself stranded on a deserted island and as he starts losing hope, he decides to end it all by committing suicide. Then he spots a dead man by the shore. The man is dead but is quite flatulent. The rest of the story is about the man uses this dead man’s farts to make it to the mainland, where he finds himself lost in the wilderness and falling in love with the dead man.
I usually give black comedies a chance because most creators of black comedies have a unique sense of humor and they tend to normalize some taboo topics. When this movie (Swiss Army Man) released a few years ago and I read the movie synopsis, I was not too excited to watch it (and then eventually forgot all about it) because the plot line felt ridiculously bonkers to me.
But after watching EEAAO, I can now say that I may have watched the most bonkers movie of all time and I absolutely loved it. Michelle Yeoh gets a dream role to play in this movie, while Ke Huy Quan somehow finds to stand alone, making a mark on his own, playing her husband (in the referential universe from where the story is told), quite brilliantly. I mean, if this awards season is kind to them, then I would say, they have earned every bit of it.
When we first meet Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh), she is surrounded by receipts. She is running a laundromat and all is not well. Waymond (Ke Huy Qyon), her husband, has plans to divorce her and has papers ready, which Eveylyn would get to see only later in the movie. Evelyn does not have a good relationship with her daughter, Joy, and she tries to embarrass her when introducing her girlfriend Becky, to Evelyn’s father, Gong Gong, who has traveled from China to visit them. To make matters worse, there is an active IRS audit happening on her laundromat business. The IRS inspector Diedre (stellar performance by Jamie Lee Curtis) accuses the laundromat of fraud and Eveylyn has to go meet her in the office in order to try to convince her that all her paperwork is in place. As someone tells Evelyn later in the film, Evelyn is living her worst you. And the eccentricity of Daniels starts to unfold right there in the middle of that IRS office and we are drawn in for one hell of a ride.
What was more relatable for me to Evelyn’s character is the fact that Evelyn has tried to escape her monotonous life many times (and failed or given up). We learn through the crazy screenplay later on that she’s wanted to be an author, an actor, a singing coach amongst dozens of other interests that eventually became more of her hobbies instead of life-altering careers.
But Evelyn’s life irrevocably changes when a version of Waymond tells Evelyn that she is just one of many Evelyns in the multiple universes and yet she is perhaps the only one who has the power that can defeat a powerful villain named Jobu Tupaki, who could destroy all the universes. Did I say there are multiple universes?
EEAAO’s screenplay has been turned by the writers into one frenetic and truly ridiculous barrage of probabilities and multiverse jumping (whose idea you get used to once you cling onto the story a little bit), and the probabilities of what Daniels could do truly just multiply. Once you are on board with the essence of the bizarre ride you are about to undertake, you know how much crazy the story would get.
But hold on!! However crazy you think this story can get — Just multiply it…double it or triple it or quadruple it. There are no stops, no rules preventing the makers from going wild, no idea that can be restrained. Anything you can imagine, Daniels have thought of it and thrown it into the movie. The steady flow of outlandish ideas that cram at you one after another without giving you enough time to process, can sometimes feel suffocatingly overwhelming, but when they come together, you want to tip your hat to the brilliance of the directors.
In the end, EEAAO is like an Everything Bagel — so full of probabilities (as referenced by Jobu).
The performances by Yeoh, Quan, Hsu (who plays Joy) and others are all top notch. Each character has to play so many versions of themselves in the multiverse madness, and be able to meet the challenges thrown at them. As the central grounding character, Yeoh is incredible in whatever incarnation of Evelyn we see her in (bringing the original Evelyn’s aspirations, attitude, and fears with her). Quan gives an earnest, emotional, and hilarious performance. And Hsu, the character who is the emotional gravitas of the plot, has to be extremely vulnerable and one of the biggest threats to the universes, both at the same time, which is not an easy task.
My only critique is in the few extra minutes the Daniels take in the third act, to establish all the grander talking points of their story. But since I had already fallen in love with the movie, and was willing to take the ride with this bonkers screenplay, no matter what, I was vindicated in the end when it all came together.
From the hopelessness of depression, to the little miracles and moments that truly make life worthwhile, to those small acts of kindness becoming your extraordinary asset, Evelyn and her family show us, it’s OK to be a mess.
After spending a few hours processing this bonkers of a movie, what I realized is this. Above all the ambitiousness and the audacious attempt to cram so much into it, EEAAO is a love letter to moms who are facing the challenges of being a parent to an adult child. It is an extremely touching story about the paths we take in our lives, the paths that we did not take, and how they lead us to exactly where we need to be. And why sometimes, holding onto something we love by letting go of them, may just make our lives a little bit better.
