After Everything, Everywhere, All At Once swept this year’s Oscars, we saw an increased amount of circulation for it, and well, I was curious to see what all the buzz was about.
Evelyn Wang has a lot on her plate. She’s being audited for her laundromat business; she’s trying to throw together a party for her often difficult father, who’s visiting from China; she has a tense relationship with her own very American daughter, Joy; and her husband Wayman painted the wrong shade of white on the ceiling of the laundromat.
It’s a mundane life, and one that Evelyn doesn’t get a lot of joy from. But she soon learns that she lives in a multiverse of parallel universes and not all of the Evelyns, Waymans, and Joys live such an ordinary life. Complications ensue. . . .
I hesitate to sketch out too much of the plot because I really enjoyed the fact that I knew so little about the plot of the movie beyond the vague idea it involved a multiverse of some kind, and the film does a great job of vividly building its very imaginative and surreal world.
I enjoyed the movie very much. It’s entertaining–I often laughed out loud while watching it–in a way that’s both very smart and very silly. However, to call it a comedy is to ignore how many serious themes it explores in a fun, stylized way, ranging from philosophy to mental health to Asian-American identity. It is, if you’ll pardon the pun, a martial arts action movie, philosophical sci fi flick, and absurd family comedy, all at once, and it manages to blend all of these elements together nicely.
It’s also very well-acted. Michelle Yeoh stars as the put-upon and occasionally difficult Evelyn, with Ke Huy Quan as her earnest husband Wayman, Stephanie Hsu as her frustrated daughter Joy, James Hong as her intimidating and at times overbearing father, and Jamie Lee Curtis as the dour IRS auditor who seems to take special delight in telling the Wangs that their tax filing is a mess. All of them really sell the “regular” versions of these characters–which in many ways I found the most interesting because they were the most relatable–as well as the far more fantastical multiverse versions of them that could be significantly more confident, talented, or villainous.
This frenetic, surreal movie is not for everyone. It takes some fairly weird and at times gross narrative turns that is not going to appeal to every viewer, but if you want to watch a very 21st century exploration of that timeless question about what another life could be like, this is a fantastic and very original movie.
Have you watched this movie? Did you enjoy it? What was your favorite movie from last year? Tell us in the comments! As always, please follow this link to our online library catalog for more information on this item or to place it on hold.
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