In that vein, watching Everything Everywhere reminds me of synchronized swimming or dance. The fluidity with which the actors morph their style to match the required tone is almost as amazing and the movie’s ability to mash up sequences of random scenes and turn them into a beautiful, coherent collage. Cutting between kung fu movie homage, to slapstick comedy, to gut wrenching scenes at breakneck pace, none of the performances ever feel off kilter or wrong for the moment. From Michelle Yeoh to cameos from Jenny Slate and Biff Wiff, every actor clearly understands the movie they’re in. The movie asks a lot from the performers - each actor must play numerous versions of their character throughout the multiverse - and each one delivers with style and focus. If one of them went flat, the movie couldn’t get where it wanted to go. If everything Everything Everywhere is a car, and the multiverse is the frame holding it together, each of the four Wang family members - Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh), her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu), and her father Gong Gong (James Hong) - are the wheels (In this metaphor Jamie Lee Curtis is a swath of colorful bumper stickers). At the center of that question - and the answer - is her family. Evelyn becomes a woman cursed with the knowledge of what her life could’ve been, navigating through the noise to try and find what makes life worth living. When Evelyn is thrust into the multiverse, the film uses the alternate realities to examine these old problems in a new way. There’s pressure from her father, insecurity with her husband, misunderstanding with her daughter, and to top it all off her laundromat is being audited by the IRS. When the movie starts we find Evelyn juggling multiple looming threats to her family. Everything Everywhere All at Once is certainly exquisitely and ornately adorned but by using the multiverse as a tool to interrogate the characters rather than being the entire focus, it’s also the farthest thing from meaningless. If the multiverse is just used as a spectacle, the movie comes off as an empty box, an ornately adorned vessel that doesn’t actually carry any real meaning inside of it. It can be used to examine the purpose of life, what - if anything - matters, and the simultaneous finite and infinite nature of existence. A tool that can pick apart our emotional insecurities over the frailty of our miniscule realities. The multiverse, at its peak potential, is a stylistic tool. These movies and shows all make the same mistake, which is thinking that the multiverse concept is “substance.” It’s not. “the substance.” Over the past few years we’ve seen numerous shows and movies use the multiverse as the dominating plot point, central theme, and emotional core of their story all at once. “the style” - is worthless if you don’t actually have something to talk about - i.e. One of the greatest rules of writing is “substance before style.” That means all the flashy language and lyric prose in the world - i.e. ![]() It’s a conversation about finding where you fit in the world. Everything Everywhere All at Once is also a family story about generational culture gaps and barriers. While at face value this is an accurate description of Everything Everywhere All at Once - the film directed by Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert follows Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) as she’s roped into a multiversal plot to save all space and time - it’s reductive. If Everything Everywhere All at Once was described on a theater marquee, the biggest blazing neon word would be “multiverse.” Over the past couple of months the marketing for the film has made it clear that being a movie about the multiverse (a concept slingshotted into the modern zeitgeist by content like Spider Man: No Way Home, Loki, and Rick and Morty) is the way A24 plans to bring in the big theater crowds and by extension, the big bucks. ![]() Still From Everything Everywhere All at Once (From A24)
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |