Everything Everywhere All at Once

Writers-Directors: Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. 2022.

If Everything Everywhere All at Once was a culinary item, it would be something multilayered, like lasagna. But in addition to noodles, cheese, sausage, onion, garlic, and tomato, the lasagna would include mayonnaise, M&Ms, olives, Frosted Flakes, tortilla chips, bananas, pickles, bacon, fries, rice pilaf, and orange juice. And instead of a seasoned chef, the lasagna would be prepared by someone with hot dogs instead of fingers, a visual that Everything Everywhere All at Once makes literal. This is a movie with a fitting title, a movie that throws anything and everything at the wall, with the belief that the finished product is something beautiful and profound.

In the eyes of seemingly every critic and viewer, the Daniels (as the co-writers and co-directors are called) have succeeded in their pursuit. Everything Everywhere All at Once received the most Oscar nominations (11) of any movie from this past year, a cherry on top of the massive box office numbers and rave reviews. A Best Picture win seems like an inevitable coronation. As a movie that engages with the concept of a multiverse, Everything Everywhere All at Once has achieved a reputation of intellectual heft. It has also been heralded as exactly the type of innovative, representational work that studios should make more frequently.

In a separate universe, there is me, having watched this movie and having concluded that it is aggressively not my thing. Where others see philosophy, vision, and entertainment, I see incoherence, excess, and boredom. To be clear, this is not at all the fault of the cast, all of whom (especially Oscar frontrunners Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan) are fully committed and persuasive. Nor is it the result of something irredeemable. There is an elegance to some of the action sequences, and a warm-hearted empathy to the depiction of family in the scenes that are grounded in the domestic realm. Unfortunately, the Daniels devote most of their emphasis to the frenzy of the multiverse, with shifting perspectives and identities, each scene crazier than the last. A clear description of the plot is beyond my capabilities. Let’s just say that I never had a solid grasp of what was actually happening, and that I imagined the Daniels having “CHAOS” written on all of the walls around them as they worked to develop the film. In addition to the aforementioned hot dog hands, there is a bagel that has literally everything (all the world’s hopes and dreams, etc.), a large penis that is swung around as a weapon, a guy who sits on a copier with his pants down, a guy who spits confetti when he is hit, a dog who gets stuck in a fridge, and a guy who eats chapstick. It is too much, and any substantive meaning eluded me.

I’m happy that so many people love this movie. As a firm believer that everything is subjective when it comes to responses to art, I view my reaction as nothing more than an opinion, one that can be justifiably regarded as misguided. I lament, though, what I view as a tendency to mistake bigness for depth. Everything Everywhere All at One is a big movie, more loaded with stuff than most other movies. That does not mean that it has something insightful to say.