Well, I have to admit that I took a bit of a mental break from movie night for Winter Quarter 2023 – there was a bout of Covid, there were some concerns about attendance, it is what is. But I got it back together for Spring Quarter, and started it out by presenting the very recent 2022 Best Picture winner Everything Everywhere All At Once, directed by duo Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, previously known at Cinema 1544 for the fart-tastic Swiss Army Man. Everything Everywhere All At Once went a lot lighter on the flatulence, but still had some pretty obvious through-motifs (golly, ANOTHER circle?) I had seen the film once, but as it’s somewhat complicated it definitely stands a second viewing to allow you to put it all together. For what it’s worth, I feel like in the end the film is significantly less than the sum of its parts, but I suppose I’ll get to that. What was the plot all about again?
Did I mention I was Short Round?
The film primarily follows the Wang family through the matriarch Evelyn. Evelyn has some personality issues – she’s controlling, she’s dismissive, she ignores her husband Waymond, she has a strained relationship with her daughter Joy (particularly over Joy’s lesbian relationship with her girlfriend Becky) and with her father Gong-Gong, who rejected her after she moved to America with Waymond to pursue their fortune, but who is finally in town visiting. Why is he visiting? Well, Evelyn is putting together a Chinese New Year’s party at the laundromat that the Wangs own (and live above). While planning this party is taking up all of Evelyn’s time, she is brushing off as best she can an IRS audit that appears to be largely her own fault, as she has a tendency to use her business to write off tons of personal expenses that obviously don’t qualify. To top it all off, Waymond is trying (and thus far failing) to serve the far-too-busy Evelyn with divorce papers on the premise that this will at least force them to find time to talk about their relationship. So, I mean, that’s pretty much Everything.
You know, for kids!
Oh, look! The auditor Deirdre, who has a definite bone to pick with Evelyn, is played by Jamie Lee Curtis! Won’t this be fun!
Even the ultraskilled AlphaWaymond cannot make a fanny pack cool
Evelyn and the family finally go to meet Deirdre, but the audit is somewhat interrupted by Waymond being literally possessed by a different, badass, multiverse jumping Waymond. He tells her that he comes from what he refers to as the Alphaverse – the universe where multiverse jumping was first invented, by none other than his brilliant scientist wife AlphaEvelyn.
Say what you will about the tenets of Everything Bagelism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos
AlphaWaymond is searching through the multiverses for an Evelyn that can fight the evil destructive power of Jobu Tupaki, an all-powerful nihilist who threatens to destroy every multiverse everywhere. We’ll figure out eventually that Jobu Tupaki is really AlphaJoy, who was identified by AlphaEvelyn as the first person with the skill to do multiverse jumping. The problem is that AlphaJoy got so good at it that she eventually became able to be Everywhere All At Once, and what she learned from this experience was the inevitable result of materialism taken to its logical extreme: “Nothing. Matters.” It’s pretty difficult for a regular mortal to try to come to terms with a nihilistic principle like that, but for a nearly-omnipotent verse-jumping being to do so would seem to border on the impossible.
Look out! It’s the Literally Everything Bun!
What follows is an overly-long multiverse chase that features Evelyn dipping into the Evelyns of other universes to borrow their developed abilities. For instance, there’s a universe where Evelyn did NOT leave China with Waymond due to Gong-Gong’s objections, and instead she became a famous singer and pinkie-finger martial arts actress. (Maybe that was two different universes? It’s a bit hard to keep track.) Because Evelyn needs pinkie martial arts powers to fight Jobu Tupacki, of course.
You’re up to date on your rabies series, right?
But most of the universes are a bit more ridiculous. For instance, there’s a universe where Evelyn works at a hibachi restaurant (she needs knife skills), and where the master hibachi cook secretly wears Raccocoonie under his hat, who is able to control him via hair pulls and gives him the greatest knife skills of all. No, this isn’t sarcasm, this is the movie.
I don’t care what you have to do, this hand will never cost more than $7.50!
Another universe features humans who have evolved hot dogs for fingers, because Evelyn needs some foot dexterity skills. Incidentally, in this universe HotDogEvelyn and HotDogDeirdre are in love, for what it’s worth.
If rock is wet, it’s raining. If rock has google eyes, you have been pranked by a teenage girl.
Another universe is completely lifeless and uninhabited except for SentientRockEvelyn and SentientRockJobuTupaki, both of whom eventually end up wearing google eyes (another through-motif, though it really does fall under “circle” as well). I don’t think any skills come into play here – it’s more an opportunity for Evelyn and Jobu Tupacki to work through some stuff with a bit less chaos and destruction (which is the majority of the film, really).
Most definitely not for kids
The crux of the whole thing is that however it looks, Jobu Tupacki isn’t really out to kill all the Evelyns in every universe, she’s really just searching for the right one. You see, Jobu has created a Literally Everything Bagel, which has naturally collapsed in on itself into a singularity, and Jobu is simply searching for an Evelyn who is a good enough verse-jumper to experience the existential dread that Jobu does, and who will accompany her into sweet, sweet oblivion, annihilated by the Literally Everything Bagel singularity.
Of course, Evelyn eventually manages to convince Jobu that this is not the way by doing her best to bring happiness to everybody she encounters in every universe, and we jump back to the original universe to deal with the aftermath of the Chinese New Year party.
“I can’t believe I ate all the dim sum.” “I can’t believe she ate all the dim sum.”
Though things get a bit rough, Evelyn does finally get her shit together, and barring an unnecessary and forgettable audit coda, the movie ends with Evelyn and Joy reconciling, Evelyn telling her daughter that despite the fact that she is an imperfect woman who can’t seem to avoid saying and doing cruel things, that there’s really no place in all of the universes that she would rather be than right there with her. It’s kind of sweet. The End.
So that’s the basic plot of the movie. That said, I’ve got a ton of issues with this film. I don’t even know if I can get through them all.
My biggest issue is probably with the ending, but perhaps it’s best to leave that for a moment so that I can talk about my issues with multiverses.
I hate multiverses. They’re stupid. Let’s just get that out of the way right up front. I do not believe that multiverses exist. It’s a complete nonsense concept. Basically the idea is that at every moment (presumably that would mean every Planck time – or 5.39 x 10^44 times per second) that every possibility that every one of the estimated 10^80 particles in the universe can undergo is in fact undergone in a separate, spawned-off universe. This would be bad enough if we were spawning 10^80 universes 10^44 times per second, but we haven’t even taken combinatorics into effect, and we haven’t taken into account that at Moment 2 after one universe has spawned into way more than 10^80 universes that each of those way more than 10^80 universes has to spawn into way more than 10^80 universes for just Moment 3. It’s absolutely stupid. I don’t care if your fancy Physics math says “this is happening”, it’s obviously not happening. Just stupid. It’s just a retarded crutch that people use to make themselves feel better about never asking out Sally Henderson in the 11th grade because they can lie to themselves that not only somewhere but in infinite universes they in fact did ask Sally out and they lived happily ever after. What good would that do you anyway, putz?
So multiverses are stupid, and they’re only used as a lame plot device that doesn’t ever have to make sense. And in this movie, sure enough, they’re a lame plot device that doesn’t really make coherent sense. Sometimes people actually travel into their counterpart bodies in alternate universes – for instance AlphaWaymond does this repeatedly. Sometimes people just download their counterparts’ abilities. Sometimes people have hot dogs for fingers. ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN! And all you have to do to jump from one universe to another is to do something sufficiently random or unexpected while wearing the Alphaverse Ear Pods, because of course that makes sense. (And perhaps now is the right time to point out that I’m really confident that no Best Picture winner prior to this one has ever featured a scene of naked martial arts while a giant butt plug sticks out of one fighter’s anus. Come to think of it, no Best Picture winner should EVER feature such a scene and it should have been immediately disqualifying.) Don’t get me wrong, The Daniels use the multiverse to be extremely creative – I mean, I guess – but the whole concept is poorly developed and simply allows them to do random stuff without forcing any of it to fall into a coherent framework. I say “I guess” above because to some extent it kind of feels like most of the random stuff in the film wasn’t put together inventively, but rather put together by pointing to random words in a dictionary like some sort of Mad Movie Libs. Except for the butt plug. They did that on purpose.
It only makes the multiverse setup worse when you realize that really there are on the order of seven or eight primary universes that are featured in the film to the exclusion of the other 10^infinity universes out there, and that The Daniels made a feeble attempt to have each of the minor universes have its own subplot. It’s very clearly an attempt to mimic the structure of Cloud Atlas, but as opposed to that film, where each time period has a reasonably fleshed-out plot and connecting emotional resonance to the other time periods, here the minor universe subplots are pathetically underdeveloped (but since the film is already almost two and a half hours long, thank goodness for that!) and have literally no narrative power. We don’t care. It doesn’t matter. The only subplot that matters is Jobu Tupacki as projected onto Joy. That’s it. The rest can go hang.
And so, speaking of that, I’ll come to my final gripe with the way the end of the film played out. Everything Everywhere All At Once had a chance, a small chance, to walk its way out of the multiverse nonsense by allowing us to take the interpretation that the primary universe (note: not the Alphaverse) is the only existing universe, and that Evelyn is merely imagining all of these other versions of herself and her family as she comes to grips with the one family that she does have. I mean, I’ll be honest, that would make an almost satisfying film. Maybe even more than almost satisfying. The problem is that during their final reconciliation (as well as during other parts of the film) the dialogue clearly (if subtly) indicates that Joy is really also Jobu Tupacki and has literally shared in this multiverse jumping with Evelyn. They couldn’t take the one single way out that they had (“Oh, it was just Evelyn’s imagination, but look how neatly it ties together and how her imagination meshed with the real world and how the people in these universes she dreamed up helped her to understand and overcome the problems she was faced with in the real world!” – I could have respected that) but instead had to validate the whole multiverse…thing. Big mistake. If your plot makes no sense, at least give me an out.
So I’ve seen it twice. Can’t say I won’t ever see it again, but I’m not really itching to do so. Sorry, Daniels.
Cinema 1544: The As-Official-As-It-Gets Site 