Somewhere Between Everywhere

The recent trend of multiverse stories reached a high point with 2022's Everything Everywhere All at Once. The directors, known as the Daniels, use the concept as an allegory for the current culture wars in the west but the first two thirds of the film manage to be a pretty effective story regardless.

Michelle Yeoh shows again she can be a great lead as she plays Evelyn, a Chinese immigrant who runs a laundromat in the U.S. She had all kinds of aspirations, as we learn when she visits the IRS and an ornery woman with a bad haircut (Jamie Lee Curtis) tries to tell her she can't write off the professional expenses of a singer or a novelist.

Evelyn also has the responsibility of brokering a relationship between her elderly father (James Hong) and her daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), who has an American girlfriend. All of the conflicts in Evelyn's hectic life are exacerbated when her husband (Ke Huy Quan) is suddenly possessed by an alternate reality version of himself and teaches her how to tap into the skills of her alternate lives. She'll need all of these skills (especially martial arts, of course) to fight the villain, a young woman trying to pull the universe into some kind of interdimensional black hole.

Surprisingly, Evelyn, a conservative, is positioned as the heroine of the allegory. Her desire for the universe to remain relatively stable sure seems more reasonable than the postmodern nihilism of the film's villain. But the film is a negotiation between the two political extremes as it is a conflict between generations. Some change, certainly, is in order, but past experience does have meaning and significance.

The film kind of reminds me of Netflix's Russian Doll, which also begins by taking a well trodden Sci-Fi path in an interesting new direction, but falls apart in its final act. Everything Everywhere All at Once falls apart in exactly the same way. It's as though the writers panicked and thought the audience wouldn't get exactly the message they wanted to transmit, so they threw all of the established logic of the world they created out the window so the characters can directly info-dump their motives at each other. It gets a little tedious and if the over two hour film had been trimmed by about thirty minutes, it would have been great. As it is, it's pretty good.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is available on Showtime.

Twitter Sonnet #1647

Another chore begins a life repeat.
Again the dishes stack beside the arm.
The dull progression spells a long defeat.
The sluggish action chews pistach'yo charm.
The shrinking coin reflects a rising price.
Discussing bread, the girls dispersed to play.
To bake the dough, the mistress treats it nice.
And now is how an hour comes a day.
Aloft, the lizards fight for chimney rights.
Escaping clouds were warned of dimming skies.
The stars converse and hold the twinkle lights.
Prevention stirs the heart to wanting pies.
The crawling numbers smear the dawn and dusk.
A sightless hulk departs the waxy husk.