Apparently, for the month of April in 2022, the thing to do is put out some kinda weird tribute to a longtime actor, known for action roles among other things, and in a movie that is, as much as anything else, a tribute to the star. Except, I didn’t go see the Nicolas Cage tribute The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. Oh, I really want to, but I skipped trips to the movies for a couple weeks since I planned to see older relatives for Easter and didn’t want to risk a COVID infection. Easter being over, I backtracked to see something else with the plan to catch up on both the Cage movie and The Northman next week.
Instead, I went to see the great Michelle Yeoh in what is probably even weirder than the Cage flick, Everything Everywhere All at Once.
Evelyn Wang (Yeoh) is living a life of quiet disappointment. She and her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) own a failing laundromat in America. Her Chinese father (James Hong) apparently does not approve of her, and he is currently staying with the couple. Waymond has divorce papers, though he doesn’t seem to want to give them to her. Their daughter, the symbolically-named Joy (Stephanie Hsu), is a lesbian with a loving girlfriend (Tallie Medel), but Evelyn won’t tell her father that and the unwillingness to say so is among many things that is driving a wedge between mother and daughter. On top of everything else, the Wangs are being audited by the IRS, and the auditor (Jamie Lee Curtis) is the type to take special pleasure in enforcing rules and not much else.
But there’s more to all this than simply Evelyn has tried and failed at many different things in her life: her husband is sometimes not her husband. Apparently, there’s a mutliverse where every decision anyone has ever made splits off into a new universe where the opposite decision was made. One Waymond knows how to hop between realities and possess different versions of himself. He says Evelyn can do something similar: by doing something improbable and often weird, she can access the skills, emotions, memories, and knowledge of other versions of herself. And there are some really weird universes out there, but the problem is there is a great evil in the multiverse, one that is wiping out different Evelyns, Waymonds, and perhaps whole universes, but this Waymond thinks this Evelyn, even with her many failures, may be able to stop that evil by tapping her other lives. Can she? And how?
This movie came from the A24 studio, and yeah, this is an A24 movie alright. It starts off weird and funny, then slowly morphs into something that is sentimental and perhaps even deep in places but always weird. Yes, Evelyn can perhaps save the multiverse, but not the way anyone else might think to. It helps that Yeoh is so damn good at what she does. Yes, she can be harried wife and mother, but she can also play a convincing martial arts movie star, to say nothing of the other very weird Evelyns that exist on different Earths, even weird ones like an Earth where humans evolved hot dogs for fingers. When the movie starts, it’s often quite funny, and often darkly funny at that. But once Evelyn and the movie figures out what it’s doing, the movie takes a turn to the more sentimental side.
It helps that as good as Yeoh is, the rest of the cast is just as good. Quan holds his own as Waymond, a man with arguably the opposite sentiment as his wife. Hong is generally a delight in anything. Hsu gives a solid performance herself. And Curtis is the perfect grumpy bureaucrat using whatever power she has to make other people miserable. However, the movie being what it is, each of these actors also plays alternate versions of these same characters, and again, no one gives a bad performance in this delightfully weird movie. If anything, it felt a little long as it got towards the end, but really, a movie like this is pretty much in my wheelhouse.
Hopefully, next week’s trip to see Nic Cage do his own take on such a work will be just as worthwhile.
Grade: A-
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