All the Things
Including, most importantly, Michelle Yeoh as a rock with googly eyes
Watching
Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)
The Nintendo Switch fighter game Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, released some three and a half years ago, launched with the tagline “Everyone is here.” What started as a reference to one thing (all fighters from all four previous installments of the franchise would be playable out of the box) took on new meaning in the ensuing years, as a dozen characters purchasable as downloadable content expanded the game’s fighting roster to include ever-more crossovers with franchises totally outside the Nintendo ecosystem. Everyone is here because everything is here, all at once, thanks to the internet age and the universe-blending (and cross-company IP legal negotiations) it enables.
The “everyone is here” ethos has also been on display at the movies. Though I’ve seen none of these movies, both the Avengers: Infinity War dyad—the first of which came out the same year as Smash Ultimate—and Spider-Man: No Way Home were marketed on the quirk of bringing together (though amassing might be the more accurate term in the case of the former) characters from across Marvel properties and iterations thereof. Ditto for Zack Snyder’s Justice League (and Zack Snyder’s Justice League). Where is a franchise supposed to go (read: how is a franchise supposed to continue to top itself at the box office) after you’ve already brought together all the marquee stars for a once-in-a-generation event? The Batman goes the way of a total reset (to the tune of a nifty $360 million in domestic ticket sales), while the soon-to-be-released Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness seems to be wandering more in the direction of the superstructure that makes all this fun with crossovers possible.
Everything Everywhere All at Once, the new film from Daniels (Emerson College buddies Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan), is riding a similar when-universes-collide wavelength. As a product of the particular era of interconnectivity we’re living through, it’s unsurprisingly a runaway hit with the very-online. At the time of this writing, it holds the highest average weighted rating of all movies on Letterboxd (displacing former crownholder Parasite) with 5-star reviews from over half of the 112,000 users who have logged it1. A lot of the reactions I’ve seen to it have mirrored the implicit breathless enthusiasm of the title: it’s everything; it’s the best thing I’ve ever seen; Michelle Yeoh is the GOAT (I’m not one to argue with that).
I will attempt a quick plot summary (wish me luck). EEAO stars Yeoh as laundromat owner Evelyn Wang, an immigrant to the States from China. On an otherwise routine visit to the IRS (where Jamie Lee Curtis is on tap as a villainously starchy bureaucrat), Evelyn finds herself caught up in an interdimensional conflict implicating her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), who on the one hand has just served her with divorce papers but on the other seems to have been sent to her universe from afar to train Evelyn in the ways of algorithmic randomization to harness superpowers from permutations of herself across the multiverse (just go with it, I don’t have all day); her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu), the queer, nihilistic byproduct of first generation immigrants and Tumblr (across the metaverse, she’s hailed as Jobu Tupaki, a figure of quasi-divine power and infamy—sorry for doxxing); and her father Gong Gong (James Hong), because it’s inherently funny when a character who only speaks and understands Chinese in the first act is revealed to know English in the second, I guess?
As far as I can tell, the runaway success of this movie in some quarters seems to rest on a few factors:
Michelle Yeoh is awesome; we’ve all seen that one fight scene in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, at minimum; here she gets to do her own fight choreography and so much more.
The technical execution of the movie’s many, many tones, genres, sets (as has been pointed out elsewhere, it’s basically a two-set movie, between the laundromat and the IRS building), props, and visual effects, is on point.
The movie is an original property—we’re talking original characters, ideas, jokes, and all the rest. How novel!
Despite its wall-to-wall randomness and silliness, the movie has a strong emotional through-line, up to and including a victory over nihilism that’s especially resonant what with all the despair-inducing things happening in the world right now.
There’s a scene where they get turned into rocks! It’s hilarious!
Etc.
As I was watching the movie, I kept wondering what various Letterboxd celebrities would have to say about it. Truly this is a movie that’s the byproduct of the Letterboxd era: from the earnestness to the foregrounding of queer characters to the imitation Wong Kar-wai segment replete with Chunking Express-era slo-mo effects. In a scene where Jenny Slate picks up a dog on a leash and uses it like a ball and chain, I instantly thought “I bet the woman who puts a vegan rating in all of her reviews is going to hate this.” (She did!) Letterboxd itself even knows the role it’s playing here: if you log the movie there, the standard “watched” icon has been swapped out for one of the googly eyes from the film.
A friend of the newsletter filed their own Letterboxd review of EEAO last week with a lower-than average 3-star rating and diagnosed something about the movie that I haven’t seen anyone else say but which makes perfect and immediate sense to me: it’s tidy. This may be more evident if, like me, you’ve watched or went back after watching EEAO to watch one of Yeoh’s early-career Hong Kong action flicks. Yes, Madam! (1985), her leading lady screen debut, was my choice. Yes, Madam! shares a certain silliness and inventiveness with EEAO, but the execution is even messier. The movie drunkenly careens from scene to scene, relegating Yeoh and her co-lead Cynthia Rothrock to the background for long stretches; at no point can you be sure whether director Corey Yuen is going to land this plane or crash it into the ocean. By contrast, the filmmaking form of EEAO feels assured and deliberate, even when the content from scene to scene has all the logic of a Jackson Pollock. This makes sense when you think about it. If you’ve budgeted for and storyboarded five scenes involving a CGI raccoon pulling on a hibachi chef’s hair à la Remy the rat from Ratatouille, you can’t show up the day of the shoot and decide that it would actually be a lot funnier if you improvised the scene as a parody of the Muppets instead (at least, not without great additional cost to the production).
That the film should be tidy also makes sense from a number of other angles. The everything, everywhere, all at once-ness of life in the internet age can be overwhelming, and a movie that manages to channel that sensation into a story that ultimately follows an emotional path from A to B (with a lot of raunchy, randomized elements along the way) is especially soothing. No matter how harebrained its tangents, the film never loses sight of the central family drama and the need to provide resolution, reconciliation, and uplift. It’s not the only direction this movie could have gone in; it may have been cathartic in a different way if the movie had been even more devious with blowing up narrative conventions. Imagine if it had ended with a Zoom-like megagrid of screens showing dozens of variations on how the story is progressing across the multiverse.
Many of the choices Daniels make in EEAO feel to me like they were made because they could bank on a target audience—Letterboxd users who are in agreement with the directors that Michelle Yeoh is the best—eating them up. I think they play their hand a bit too much when Daniel Scheinert casts himself in the movie as a security guard who gets to enjoy a fantasy of Yeoh spanking him in a secret sex dungeon in the IRS building. His presence in that scene, though it’s only a brief clip in a montage of lunacy, feels like it’s asking the audience a leading question: don’t you agree that Yeoh is so amazing you would even let her do naughty things to you? Not to kink shame but I’m personally no fan of having my desires dictated to me, either by algorithm or by moviemaker.
Kyle Turner wrote last week on how, almost counterintuitively, the limits of Daniels’ imagination undercut the movie’s ambitions at innovation both thematic and technical: “How far can you go if your starting point is always a particular view of maleness, sexuality, and maybe even race?” Turner uses the movie’s butt plug jokes as a case study in how the film’s ostensibly progressive aims are held back by its directors’ unexamined ideas, but you could just as easily find other elements to make the same point. Joy’s girlfriend is just kind of emotionlessly along for the ride; what’s she thinking through all this? Is their relationship really nothing to Joy, who’s so caught up in her family traumas that she’s willing to summon the apocalypse by way of an everything bagel? For as touching, fun and, frankly, marvelous as the movie can be, I find myself thinking more about its absences than anything that actually made it onscreen2. Notice which indefinite pronoun didn’t make it into the title: I think Daniels still have a lot to learn from everyone.
Coming Soon
Who’s going to Cannes next month? New films by David Cronenberg, Kelly Reichardt, the Dardennes, Cristian Mungiu, Claire Denis, Park Chan-wook, George Miller, and more! Rumors of a new David Lynch project have been greatly exaggerated…probably.
That number was 97,000 when I started writing this newsletter two days ago and the change has not appreciably altered the high-rating ratio.
Except for the part where they’re rocks, which, I repeat, is awesome.