Starring: Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan, Stephanie Hsu, Jamie Lee Curtis, James Hong, Jenny Slate, Harry Shum Jr.
Written and Directed by: Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert
The 95th Academy Awards will be presented on March 12 and the movie with the most Oscar nominations is not Top Gun: Maverick, Elvis, or even Avatar: The Way of Water, but a small film featuring a predominantly Asian cast called Everything Everywhere All At Once.
If you haven’t seen the movie but maybe seen some advertising for it, you may think it’s an action movie with some Kung Fu or something like that as the movie stars martial arts Asian action star and icon, Michelle Yeoh. And yes, you would be partially correct to believe that EEAAO is an action film.
But don’t be fooled by the slick fight sequences you may have caught in a YouTube clip or on a commercial. There is a reason why EEAAO has picked up the most Oscar nominations and why it’s cleaning up awards left and right on its journey to Oscar gold.
An action movie set in the multiverse
On the surface level, yes, EEAAO is a multiverse action film where Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh), a frazzled Chinese immigrant mother and co-owner of a laundromat is being sought after by the all powerful Jobu Tupaki (Stephanie Hsu) in addition to the all mighty IRS.
Jobu is out to destroy everything in her path and it doesn’t matter what universe it is. While trying to focus on her business which is being audited by the IRS, Evelyn is sprung with the surprise and knowledge that she and those around her--including her equally long suffering but overly optimistic husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) exist in other universes. And to top it off, only she can put a stop to Jobu. This is really starting to sound like the description of an action film, right? But wait! There’s so much more to this little movie that could.
While we watch Evelyn and Waymond fight against Jobu and her crew of bad guys, we’re also watching a family struggling to survive and stay together in trying times. At the start of the film, we learn that the Wang family, made up of Evelyn, Waymond, and their daughter Joy, live in a crowded apartment above their modest laundromat.
The difficult struggles of those unseen and unheard by society
The living quarters are even more crowded as Evelyn’s elderly father has come to visit them all the way from China. But his visit isn’t a happy one. Joy, who is a lesbian, has to hide her true self and her girlfriend, Becky in order to keep things calm with Gong Gong.
Joy seems to be at her wit’s end with her mom and her life in general, but the family troubles don’t stop there. Waymond isn’t aggressive and angry like Evelyn, but he’s the first to present divorce papers to Evelyn. The tough times the Wang Family is going through is very similar to how many families and in particular Asian immigrant families experience.
What’s groundbreaking about Everything Everywhere All At Once is that the central figure of the movie is a character who is never top of mind for a movie let alone society. Evelyn dresses in the typical older Chinese immigrant woman uniform of the polyester loose pants and frumpy sweater vest. Even Evelyn’s stringy salt and pepper hair that’s dryer than straw is cutting it a little too close for us who’ve grown up around these type of women.
As Michelle Yeoh has mentioned in interviews, Evelyn is the woman who you would pass by on the street and never notice. And there are many women like Evelyn who live their lives and do the best they can, but they’re not really seen or heard by society.
But in Everything Everywhere All At Once, we get to see this invisible person--who is supposed to be content with living in a cluttered apartment above a laundromat frequented by strange characters because she’s in America--live out all of the different lives she is capable of living out. She’s a famous movie star. Opera singer. Chef. Partner to a woman with hot dog fingers. She’s even a rock. She’s a different Evelyn in each universe, but she’s always Evelyn. It just so happens that in the current universe, she’s an older Asian lady who runs a laundromat that is being threatened to be taken away by the IRS while her husband is threatening to divorce her and her daughter is threatening to separate herself from the family.
Jobu is Joy and being the daughter of Evelyn, she has inherited the pain and suffering of her mom and dad, but especially from her mom. Evelyn’s own parents cut her off when she chose to marry her poor husband, Waymond, against their wishes. This estrangement from her parents appears to have contributed to Evelyn’s growing bitterness and resentment towards Waymond and her present life. And yet, she digs her heels in and carries on. Unlike Waymond, she never chose to dissolve the marriage. And unlike Joy, she never chose to give up.
As for Joy, this inter-generational trauma that was passed onto her is not something she wants. But something she wants to destroy. As Jobu, she doesn’t see a point to hoping and trying for a life that just disappoints. It’s best to just give up.
What is so sneaky about this movie is that beneath the action, beneath the multitude of wild things thrown at you like the offbeat music, bizarre costumes, colorful makeup, and crazy props like hot dog fingers, we as the audience need to pay attention and focus on the actual meaning of the movie. That’s just like life, isn’t it? There’s all of this noise and nonsense and some of it seems really cool and great, but what is our purpose in life? What is the meaning of my life?
EEAAO is for those marginalized and minimized by society's decisions, not theirs
The target audience for the movie is for the Evelyn’s, Joy’s, Waymond’s, Deirdre’s, and folks of the world who need to use a laundromat to clean their clothes. It’s for those who exist in the world, but they’re not seen or heard by society. As Jobu says when she’s told by a cop that she couldn’t be in the hall that they were in,
“Is it that I can’t be here or that I’m not allowed to be here? See, I can physically be here, but what you meant to say you’re not allowing me to be here.”
Next to the now famous “laundry and taxes” monologue by the wealthy version of Waymond Wang that most people have now heard about, that snippet of dialogue sums up the meaning behind Everything Everywhere All At Once. All of us exist here physically. But for some reason, other people besides ourselves get to determine whether or not we’re allowed to be here.
The movie centers on an immigrant family and that statement is very true for a lot of people who find their way to a land that they weren’t born into. They exist. They’re there. But a lot of people get to have a lot of say in their existence and therefore their humanity. Think about it. Whenever people talk about migrants at the border or immigrants as a group in society, it’s as if people are talking about objects that have no thoughts or feelings or faces. They’re these things that you can bucket and categorize however you like because you’re not an immigrant and so you have a right to determine their existence.
But there’s a lot of people in society who get treated in this same manner and they don’t have to be immigrants. Deidre Beaubeirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis), the IRS agent assigned to review the case of the Wangs, is not an immigrant, but she’s an older lady herself, divorced, and works at a soul sucking job for the IRS. She’s not seen or heard either despite physically taking up space in this world. Her humanity comes out when she learns that Evelyn is going through what she went through with her ex-husband.
I come from a family very similar to the Wangs and I understand the bitterness and resentment. That bitterness and resentment sadly can carry forward generation after generation and infect whole branches of the family tree. There’s often not a lot of smiling or happiness or humor. But shit gets done. Bills get paid. Life kind of boils down to a “laundry and taxes” mindset in many immigrant families.
As a kid, you wonder to yourself why they bothered even immigrating here and how did any of them like each other enough to get married. The scene where Evelyn looks back on the good parts of her life with Waymond finally showed us that there was actual love between her and her husband despite the constant fighting complaining. She just needed to go back to those feelings rather than sinking further into the pessimism that has taken over her life and personality.
Despite the suckiness and repetitive nature of life that so many of us are trapped in, we can’t give up. We can’t submit to anger. Life is better when we find the good in things. In the final fight scene, Evelyn fights back not with hate but with love. With each adversary that she encounters, they’re all smiles when she pinpoints that one thing that could make them happy. Whether it’s fixing their back problems or giving them a spritz of perfume that their late wife used to wear, that’s all the person needed to let go and be happy.
If you’re interested in seeing Everything Everywhere All At Once, it’s available in theatres or on streaming services like Amazon Prime.
Comments