Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one with the fewest Spider-Men,
And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost wrote “The Road Not Taken” in 1915 as a reflection on self-determination, or maybe a goof on his walking buddy. But, c’mon, he’s clearly got the multiverse on his mind. Two roads, two choices, two lives, two realities, each with their own paths, switchbacks, boulevards, alleys — all forming matrices of universes of possibilities. It’s a potent concept, pregnant with potential for storytellers to plumb the depths of human experience.
Just kidding! The alpha function of the multiverse is to leverage IP (intellectual property) for maximal shareholder return.
Alternate timelines, branch dimensions, wild character variants, reality-destroying paradoxes — these used to be the sole province of hardcore science fiction. Today, they’re the narrative backbones of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and some of the most financially successful films of all time. And to what end? Getting out of pesky narrative corners and selling tons of merch, sure. But the black hole at the center, around which everything swirls, is nostalgia: for comics and toys you loved as a kid, for versions of characters you thought you’d never see again, for popular internet memes, even for previous movies in the MCU cycle. It’s a warm, comforting, secure embrace that feels great in these times of alienation, dislocation, and existential crisis.
To wit: Spider-Man: No Way Home, the eighth live-action wall-crawler adventure that, thanks to multiverse shenanigans, saw all three big-screen webheads fighting villains from most of the previous Spider-Man movies released over the last 20 years. It’s the third-highest grossing film of all time, and with it Disney, our economy’s apex conglomerate, reached the summit of monetizing audience’s memories and convincing viewers to buy them back at a steep markup.
What hope is there for us nerds who love the multiverse concept but just can’t anymore with cynical, conservative blockbuster cinema?
As if hearing our wails, Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert appear to offer us another road, the gonzo miracle Everything Everywhere All At Once — an audaciously inventive film that, if nothing else, reminds us that Marvel doesn’t own the multiverse. In fact, theirs is only one multiverse in a multiverse of multiverses. (Ka-blooey!)
Written and directed by Kwan and Scheinert, who work under the name Daniels and whose previous film was the equally inventive and bizarre Swiss Army Man, Everything Everywhere (EEAO from here on out) is a reality-hopping mashup of sci-fi, kung-fu, and superhero flicks, pitch-black comedy, and razor-sharp satire. It’s also a deeply affecting excavation of intergenerational emotional trauma and mid-life regret. Building on and riffing off everything from The Matrix and Office Space to the work of Wong-Kar Wai and Jackie Chan to Adult Swim and philosophical dorm room posters, EEAO leans into the absurdity and potential of the multiverse with a wanton ambition and abandon that’s becoming increasingly rare in mainstream filmmaking. And in so many ways, it’s the movie ideally suited for this moment.
Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) is in crisis. She’s under audit by the IRS, threatening the laundromat she owns with her husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), who has filed divorce papers, while she cares for her demanding father (James Hong) and struggles with her headstrong daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), trying to carve out her own life away from the suffocating one her mother has built since leaving China with Waymond in defiance of her father and with big hopes for life in California. But here, in this run-down laundromat, the googly eyes that hopeless optimist Waymond surreptitiously sticks on laundry bags and washing machines wobbling in a kind of goofy judgment, Evelyn’s life has become an abyss that has swallowed her American Dream — her dreams, period.
Sounds as fun as a Cassavetes movie. But then Alpha Waymond takes over her Waymond’s body, shoves a couple of Bluetooth headsets in the bewildered Evelyn’s ears, and gives her instructions — visualize a janitor’s closet, put your shoes on the wrong feet — on how to meet him in a third universe. Suddenly she’s in the thick of a battle against Jobu Tupaki (a sly reference to Pedro Cerrano’s voodoo idol in Major League?), a villain of immeasurable power who has created a multiverse-destroying crisis only Evelyn can stop.
And suddenly we’re slipstreamed into a film that’s completely bananas and unpredictable. Alpha Waymond, as decisive and physical as Waymond is meek and passive, dispatches a squad of IRS security guards using a fanny pack like a Hong Kong action star. Evelyn and Jobu “verse jump” into realities where they appear as piñatas, crude children’s drawings, and rocks. In one universe, humans evolved to have hot dog fingers — which is both uproariously weird and disgusting and explained using a homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey where the battle for genetic dominance is won by floppy-digited prehistoric man. Jobu kills people by turning their heads into party poppers, which explode as glitter bombs. Her multiverse-eating machine of dread sucks every emotion, hope, and dream into the hole of a black-as-night everything bagel.
The brilliance of EEAO is, partly, in its unpredictability. Much of the fun of watching EEAO is letting go and allowing Daniels to take you on this nutso journey. It wouldn’t work without their massive imaginations and creativity, and the absurdity of the logic underpinning their film makes it impossible to get ahead of them. (Not that you should try.) Every decision we make sets us on a road, creating a new node that continues branching off and forming nodes with each decision we make, no matter how small or inconsequential, weaving a near limitless multiversal network.
EEAO works because Daniels not only strictly follow this rule, they run wild with it. Whenever Evelyn, Alpha Waymond, or other verse jumpers need to acquire skills, they do random, weird things — like getting paper cuts between every finger, sucking on someone’s nose, or performing autoerotic acts that can’t be printed in a family paper — to create a new node that then slingshots their consciousness into another reality where they have increased lung capacity, for instance, or can pull off crazy martial arts.
Just as important is their casting. The film is brimming with top-tier actors, especially Hong and Jamie Lee Curtis, who steals every scene as the sad, power mad IRS agent Deirdre Beaubeirdra. But there’s no EEAO without Quan and Yeoh. Quan, who is perhaps best known as Short Round in Temple of Doom, is a revelation. What he does with his body and voice to imbue so many iterations of the same character with enough differences to be noteworthy but the spiritual similarity to be grounded makes you wonder how Hollywood could have ignored him for so long after he aged out of kid-actor roles. And Yeoh, inarguably one of the most talented actors of her generation, has the opportunity here to utilize so many tools in her kit: the kick-ass martial artist, the glamorous movie star, the relatable everywoman, the font of wisdom. It’s a history that shapes not only her performance but all of EEAO.
In each verse jump, Evelyn gets a glimpse of a life she could have had if not for. In one universe, she chooses not to go with Waymond to America, learns martial arts, and becomes a massive celebrity. That Evelyn reconnects with Waymond, who here is a suave Tony Leung-like gentleman of mystery, and when we’re in that reality Daniels’ frames it — from the look and feel to the dialogue and staging — as if it were In The Mood For Love or 2046 — a choice that not only taps into Yeoh’s history in Hong Kong cinema but also proves the perfect canvas for Evelyn to examine the depth of her regret for what she could have had and the blessings of the life (and Waymond) she has. In a similar way, Jobu, unsurprisingly, is a multiversal variant of Evelyn’s troubled daughter, their confrontations avatars for Evelyn and Joy working out their culturally and emotionally complicated relationship as mother and daughter.
Everything Evelyn experiences in her bizarre trip through alternate realities, ironically, simplifies the chaos swirling around her, bringing her closer to a clarity that — as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz realizes — the life she wants is there, only in pieces to be assembled. (Is all that verse jumping happening in Evelyn’s mind? Probably, but who cares?) It’s also a commentary on the corrosiveness of nostalgia. It’s easy to look backward and imagine what we had or alternate realities. But when we dwell on what was and might have been, we miss — and squander — what is and could be. (Daniels casting Yeoh, Quan, and Hong — actors with whom we all have long histories — was an especially sly way to make that point.)
EEAO reaches moments of true catharsis — for Evelyn, Waymond, and Joy, certainly, but for us too. When Tony Leung Waymond tells Evelyn that his seemingly naive commitment to kindness is armor in a cold, confusing world, that it’s important to be kind “especially when I don’t know what’s going on,” it lands hard after two years of rage, fear, and dread. As does Evelyn’s retort to one of Jobu’s moments of hopeless cynicism that, even in a universe where we have hot dogs for fingers, we learn to get good with our feet. It’s an absurd statement that elicits both laughs and deep recognition.
The same could be said for Everything Everywhere All Once. It’s a vibrantly weird, challenging, and uniquely hopeful film — a gorgeously untrod trail diverging from the rutted road of Hollywood homogeneity.
Everything Everywhere All At Once is now playing in limited release.
