I saw Everything Everywhere All at Once with my daughter Zoe on Saturday and it’s almost hard to put into words how powerful it is.
In an odd way it’s a perfect Mother’s Day movie.
The only thing I knew going into it was that a lot of people I respect loved it. And I’m glad I followed my intuition to see it and I loved it.
It was an exercise in trust putting my heart and attention into the hands of the creators and performers, the trust was well rewarded.
Basically, the script focuses on an essentially lost woman who is unhappy in her marriage, scared of her father and has a fractured relationship with her daughter.
AND from the starting point of a dingy laundromat they own, her and her family are involved in a CRAZY set of amazing martial art battles across a series of concurrent realities called the multiverse to find her "it".
The entire story revolves around the realization that she has made small choices throughout her life creating her current reality. And the concurrent universes show her what her life “could have been” like.
It’s really hard to explain this story, no matter how good I am at writing.
It’s part Matrix, part Euphoria, part Arrival, part Parenthood, part Ted Lasso part Monsters Inc (yes!) and so much more.
Yet, it's kinda stunning or mind blowing that a film could pick amongst so many story telling and filmmaking devices that are familiar and STILL be totally original.
I’ve been saying this the last couple years, we are in the golden age of entertainment. The films, TV shows, music speak to issues in creative and powerful and compelling ways that I’ve never experienced.
The film takes on subjects like how living in the past damages our children, how living in fear with people we love damages possibilities to connect, how hard it can be to be a young person today, how choosing kindness and love can be fierce and so many other topics.
So much of it has to do with seeing, accepting and loving (no matter HOW flawed that love is) people for who they are.
There are some parts that are just WEIRD yet there is a point. At one point the characters have “hot dog fingers” that aren’t usable and they adjust. It’s the PERFECT way to describe how we find ways to share what we have even when we have shortcomings.
How the movie also picks from the "unchosen" lives from the Multiverse to unlock the mom's potential in the present "chosen" life is a fascinating plot device.
The heartbreaking way the movie depicts how the daughter moves through the world when there is SO much to take in simultaneously that she has vision into all of it without a way to really talk about it with her mom in particular.
I can tell you (without spoiling it) the last scene with the mother and the daughter is cinema at the highest level. It is deeply, deeply moving to feel the moment when judgment and separation melts away through courage and honesty.
I so appreciate coming out of the film how small choices get us to where we are and so small choices can get us to where we'd like to go regardless of where we are.
One seemingly small aspect of the film that feels innovative is that I loved is how it’s a true hybrid Chinese/English speaking film. I have never seen that before. It FEELS like being in a multi-generational Chinese household which I think is a great device I’d like to see more to see more cultures on film.
The cast is both nostalgic and talented:
I didn’t know until the end that the lead female actor was Michelle Yeoh who is a martial arts goddess.
Her husband was the young Asian kid in the lousy Temple of Doom Indiana Jones movie but his voice sounded SO familiar throughout and does a GREAT job portraying a guy who wants to have fun in life.
The father is David Lo Pan from Big Trouble in Little China (omg old school!).
Jamie Lee Curtis is OUTSTANDING as a crazy IRS agent villain.
And the daughter named Stephanie Hsu who I’ve never seen before was so lovely as the daughter portraying the difficulty, confusion and near despair of being a young woman balanced with the full hearted desire to be what she wanted to be in the world.
Zoe and I both laughed out loud during it, both wondered WTF during it and both cried at the end (although I cried several other times during it).
It’s a movie that can be quite understood and decided on based on a review, it can only be experienced and I’m glad I did.
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