2022's Everything All At Once Is Crazy, Great and Crazy-Great
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Sometimes, kind patrons will pity me. They’ll see me review something terrible and then pay me to see something similar but good for this column.
That most recently happened when I reviewed Love Hurts as my new theatrical movie of the week for my Substack, Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas, and a much-appreciated patron paid for me to see a much better film in 2022’s Everything Everywhere All At Once.
I did not mind Love Hurts. It’s perfectly passable, the kind of undemanding fluff you can passively consume onboard an aircraft or while folding laundry while streaming it on Netflix.
It’s 83 minutes long, and Ke Huy Quan and Ariana DeBose are charmers. Despite being literally the world’’s biggest Love Hurts super-fan, to the point where I think it’s the third greatest movie of all time, after Albert Nobbs and Mank, I will be the first to concede that it is nothing compared to the 2023 winner of the Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Screenplay and Best Editing.
That’s a lot! That is very good. Unfortunately, this was released during a time when DEI turned everything upside down and made everything crazy and wrong.
We can now see that a movie starring a Chinese woman winning any award is DEI run amoke. Common sense dictates that the awards she won should have gone to Scott Baio or one of the Camerons.
Also, if they made this film now, it would star Jon Voight and ditch the whole “multiverse” thing so it can concentrate on Satanist baby-eating pedophiles setting up tunnels under the Mexico- American border.
In 2026 the top prize will undoubtedly go to something named A Patriot’s Flag’s Cross’ Prayer and star Ricky Schneider, Jim Cazievel, Kristy Swanson as Hillary Clinton and Kevin Sorbo in a wildly offensive villain brownface villain turn as “Sombrero Jose”, a Mexican sex trafficker who abducts beautiful white women from Mormon beauty pagaents so that they can harness their Adrenochrome featuring a climactic cameo from Donald Trump Jr. about how there’s still time lock Hillary Clinton up for making his dad cry.
But back in the long-ago days of 2023 it was still possible for a piece of entertainment that does not aggressively promote Donald Trump’s universally beloved “America First” agenda to achieve success and favor.
It might seem odd that I haven’t already seen Everything Everywhere All At Once. It is an objectively important film, having nearly swept the Academy Awards and grossed nearly one hundred and fifty million dollars on a modest budget.
Moreover, it is a very weird film. It’s a natural next step from filmmakers whose previous film, Swiss Army Man, was a buddy comedy where one of the buddies was a flatulent corpse.
That the writing and directing pair of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, collectively known as The Daniels, were able to make such a bizarre premise work for the length of a feature film is a tribute to their warped genius.
It’s taken years for me to finally see Everything Everywhere All At Once because I don’t much cotten to movies that win Academy Awards. They aren’t my thing. I don’t get down with respectable films of quality and distinction that proper critical acclaim.
That ain’t my bag. That’s not how I get down. I don’t swing that way.
Everything Everywhere All At Once is not typical Oscar fodder. Oscar winners are designed to make moviegoers of average intelligence feel classy, sophisticated, and intelligent. Everything Everywhere All At Once instead sets out to blow squares’ minds.
It’s designed to make granny sit up and urgently inquire, “What the fuck is this shit?” and “What were those dudes smoking, marijuana?”
It’s a kooky cult classic that impressed the establishment the same way The Substance is an Oscar favorite despite being an incredibly fucked up, uncompromisingly excessive mind-fuck.
The films are much too much in part because they last 140 minutes. You can fit an awful lot of fucked up shit in a runtime that vast. Both films are endlessly inventive in the ways they assault and confuse audiences.
Michelle Yeoh stars as Evelyn Quan Wang, a Chinese-American immigrant who owns and operates a laundromat with her kind-hearted husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan, in an Academy Award winning comeback performance of great tenderness and toigughness).
Everything Everywhere All At Once chronicles a day that would have been eventful and action-packed even if Evelyn were not unexpectedly called upon to save seemingly infinite universes, each different from the others in some small but meaningful way.
Evelyn has to visit the IRS building, where she’s being audited by tart-tongued numbers cruncher Deirdre Beaubeirdre (Oscar winner Jamie Lee Curtis) while planning a party for her demanding and disapproving father Gong Gong (legendary character actor James Hong) and processing daughter Joy’s (Stephanie Hsu) homosexuality and white girlfriend.
That is the reality in one universe. Evelyn learns from an alternate-universe version of her husband that she has a sacred destiny to bring harmony to the universe and save the destruction of myriad multiverses.
The multiverse is synonymous with comic books, superheroes, and science fiction. Everything Everywhere All at Once audaciously brings the mind-melting sense of infinite possibilities and an equivalent capacity for mayhem and madness to a banal and mundane world of laundromats, taxes, and existential angst.
With little exposition or explanation, we are plunged, alongside our heroine, into a series of overlapping worlds where the faces remain the same, but the reality deviates wildly from world to world.
Everything Everywhere All at Once commits, on a pathological level, to random bits of silliness that would qualify as throwaway gags in more straightforward fare, and yet take up a big chunk of the film’s epic runtime.
Most famously, Evelyn at one point finds herself (cue “Once in a Lifetime”) in a world where people have hot dogs for fingers and play piano with their feet. Most filmmakers would think about that idea, then immediately write it off as too silly. Not The Daniels. They run with the idea of hot dog fingers. It’s not just some strange shit they probably thought up when they were high; it’s a major of the component of the film in both its dramatic and comic aspects.
To cite another example, the beloved Pixar classic about plague-carrying vermin who loves to make food for human beings is not called Ratatouille but rather Raccocoonie, and documents the heartwarming friendship of a wannabe chef and the gifted raccoon who turns him into a hero from a zero, from a cooking chump to a cooking champ.
They even got Randy Neman to voide Raccocoonie.
This is a very silly idea THAT THE MOVIE RUNS WITH IN A WAY THAT’S GLORIOUSLY, GLORIOUSLY EXCESSIVE.
These worlds give a glimpse into the lives Evelyn might have led if she’d chosen a different path, including one where she’s glamorous actress Michelle Yeoh, or made other choices while giving the never-better Yeoh and Quan opportunities to show off their formidable fighting skills.
Everything Everywhere All at Once is appropriately named. It is a movie about everything. It's simultaneously an extended comic book goof and a meditation on the nature of existence and finding meaning and connection in a seemingly meaningless and random universe.
I will be the first to concede that I had no idea what was happening for much of the film’s duration. I didn’t mind. Not knowing what was going on didn’t take away from my enjoyment of the movie.
The Daniels designed the movie to be overwhelming. It’s supposed to be too much. It’s made to put us inside the mind of a woman with undiagnosed but pronounced ADHD (not unlike me until I was diagnosed about a year and three months ago) who finds herself in worlds beyond her imagination.
Everything Everywhere All at Once oscillates wildly yet successfully between cartoonish surrealism, childlike whimsy, and more adult moments of reflection, where the film earnestly contemplates the meaning of life in a world that seems meaningless.
The Daniels’ follow-up to Swiss Army Man is nuttier than a squirrel’s diet and crazier than a shithouse rat. It’s like a monkey’s favorite food: bananas!
I’m glad that I saw what is probably the last best picture winner to focus on people of color because I hear that Trump is already working on making it illegal for non-whites to win anything, including prestigious awards.
Nathan needed expensive, life-saving dental implants, and his dental plan doesn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can! It’s Christmas, after all, the most