Cinema Sunday: Everything Everywhere All at Once

Today's Cinema Sunday post turns it's focus on this year's Oscar winner for Best Picture. 

It's time for Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Sometimes when I do a post about a movie I've seen in this Cinema Sunday forum, I might provide some kind of plot synopsis.  

Well, I will NOT being doing that today.  Because this movie delivers what it says in the title: 

Everything.

Everywhere.

All at once. 

But really, what the hell is this thing? 

OK, here goes.... something? 

The film follows Evelyn Wang, a Chinese-American immigrant who is dealing with a lot of stuff.

• Running the laundromat she owns with her husband, Waymond.
• Waymond is trying to serve Evelyn divorce papers.
• Evelyn's demanding father is visiting.
• She's planning a Chinese New Year party.
• Her daughter is dating someone new who is NOT Chinese and also is a woman so she's having trouble wrapping her head around that. 
• And Evelyn's business is being audited by the IRS.  

It's at a very tense meeting with the IRS agent that something happens to Waymond. He's all confident, strong and talking really fast. 

Waymond has been taken over by Alpha-Waymond, a version of Waymond from the "Alphaverse." 

Wait! What?

It's a multiverse thing. 

In the Alphaverse,  Alpha-Evelyn developed "verse-jumping" technology, which enables people to access the skills, memories, and bodies of their parallel-universe selves by performing bizarre actions that are statistically unlikely. 

Alpha Evelyn is dead and the Evelyn of our world is the one who can save everything.  The multiverse is threatened by Jobu Tupaki, the Alphaverse version of Joy who intends to destroy all off the multiverse using a bagel with everything.  

Look, I can't make this any clearer.  All reality is doomed unless Evelyn can quickly learn to master "verse-jumping" to stop a world destroying version of her daughter from annihilating the multiverse with an everything bagel.  

Then... things get weird. 

Evelyn channels skills and talents from other versions of herself in multiverse such as kung fu and singing. 

Some of the alternate Earths are really weird. There's the universe where everyone has hot dogs for fingers. The upside is that Evelyn is really good at using her feet. 

And the universe where Evelyn and Joy are just rocks, communicating through words that silently float in the air of a lifeless world.  

Back in Evelyn's world, all this chaos is just about too much for Waymoud to stand and he pleas for everybody to stop fighting and to instead be kind even when life doesn't make sense.

Evelyn has an epiphany. Instead of fighting Jobu Tupaki, to try to defeat or destroy the Alphaverse Joy, Evelyn starts using her verse jumping to help people.

The everything bagel will be stopped.... with love.  

OK, that sounds kind of sappy but hey, we've earned this. We've been through everything everywhere all at once. We're due some love and affection in the end. 

Evelyn is not an easy character to love. As much as she bristles under the shadow of her demanding father, she too can be demanding. She condescending towards her husband ("He's probably making things worse," she mutters to herself as Waymond successfully negotiates another delay in the IRS audit) and is critical of Joy's life choices.  But when Evelyn's world begins to unravel, shattered by the chaos of a multiverse gone mad and the intrusion of other versions of herself, we peel away why Evelyn is the way she is and it is a most poignant tale of choices questioned and dreams deferred.  

Michelle Yeoh won the Oscar for Best Actress for her portrayal of Evelyn and it is most assuredly well deserved as Michelle has to be stern, confused, sad, angry, joyous and loving in rapid succession, sometimes in the same scene as Evelyn comes to grip with not only her role in the multiverse but her relationships to those important to her, to the people she loves.  

Ke Huy Quan deserves his Best Supporting Actor win as Waymond who takes turns being a mild mannered goofball and serious minded action dude.  

(When he was a child actor, Ke Huy Quan played Short Round in Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom. The reunion of Ke Huy Quan and Harrison Ford was a sweet, sentimental moment.) 

The team of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert won the Oscar for Best Director and damned if the Daniels didn't earn that too. With a near infinite number of worlds to play with, this movie could've easily been a muddled mess but the Daniels have it all make sense and with a sense of humor and a heartfelt emotion.

Evelyn's plunged into the multiverse opens explorations of neurodivergence, depression, identity and generational trauma.  Even at it's most absurd, Everything Everywhere All at Once compels you to think and to feel and to experience as the best movies should. 

I don't want to oversell this Everything Everywhere All at Once was an extraordinary experience for me as a movie fan and deserves all the accolades it has received.   

Next week Cinema Sunday lowers its sights a bit with an action comedy from 1990 in what might be Arnold Schwarzenegger's best movie role.