In this reality, from Rick and Morty to Doctor Strange, the multiverse is having a moment. Written and directed by Daniels, the team of Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, Everything Everywhere All at Once stars Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn Wang, who begins the story at the end of her rope. She is a Chinese American who runs a little laundromat with her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan). She’s having a hard time accepting that her teenage daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) has a girlfriend (Tallie Medel), and now that her father (James Hong) is visiting from China, Evelyn is desperate to keep the truth about her daughter’s sexuality from him. Her passive-aggressive machinations manage to alienate both her daughter and father. As if that’s not stressful enough, the laundry is getting audited by the IRS, and no-nonsense agent Deirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis) is not happy with Evelyn’s tax deductions. Why would a laundry need a karaoke machine? It’s for Evelyn’s singing career, she says. What singing career? “She confuses her hobbies with business,” explains Waymond.
Somehow, that’s the worst cut of them all. Evelyn came to America with big dreams, but nothing turned out how she planned. And things are about to get worse once Waymond serves her with the divorce papers he’s had drawn up.
For Evelyn, it’s increasingly hard to focus on her downward spiral because she’s been secretly contacted by a Waymond from an alternate universe. There, he’s married to a version of Evelyn who invented technology to travel through the multiverse — or at least, he used to be before she was killed by a mysterious figure named Jobu Tupaki. The fashion-forward temporal villain is creating a doomsday device to destroy the multiverse. Waymond thinks this Evelyn can defeat Jobu, even though many other versions have failed, because she is living the worst possible version of her life and remains full of potential.
Daniels have crafted a tour de force of pop surrealism on a budget that wouldn’t cover Avengers: Endgame’s catering bill. Yeoh plays dozens of different versions of her character, some of which reference movie roles from her storied career. The “perfect” version of Evelyn, which Jobu teases her with, The Last Temptation of Christ-style, looks a lot like Michelle Yeoh’s real life: She’s an acclaimed actress attending the red carpet premiere of Everything Everywhere All at Once.
Jamie Lee Curtis flexes her considerable comedic talent as several versions of the cranky IRS agent — at one point, she stalks Evelyn with a machete, just as Michael Myers stalked her in Halloween. The great James Hong, who has appeared in 450 films in his 93 years, is razor-sharp, differentiating different versions of Gong Gong (Chinese for “grandpa”) with both subtle expressions and a mechanized battle wheelchair. Ke Huy Quan, who played Indiana Jones’ sidekick Short Round, returns to the screen after a 20-year absence and absolutely slays, switching from dweebish failed husband to swashbuckling time warrior, often in mid-sentence.
The story is witty and inventively structured, but it never cracks under the weight of self-reference. The random acts the reality-travelers have to perform to tilt the quantum probabilities make for some great visual comedy, especially during a wild, Hong Kong-inspired fight sequence inside the IRS building. Daniels don’t shy away from the philosophical implications of the multiverse, although they explicitly reject Rick and Morty-style nihilism in favor of a more Candide approach. Since the roads not taken are unknowable, who’s to say we don’t live in the best of all possible worlds?
Everything Everywhere All at Once
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