Everything Everywhere All At Once
“Everything Everywhere All At Once accurately captures the organic changes in language and accent that divulge a character’s underlying traits.”
Title: Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)
Directors: Daniel Kwan 👨🏻🇺🇸 and Daniel Scheinert 👨🏼🇺🇸
Writers: Daniel Kwan 👨🏻🇺🇸 and Daniel Scheinert 👨🏼🇺🇸
Reviewed by Li 👩🏻🇺🇸
Technical: 5/5
Everything Everywhere All At Once’s glossy chutzpah made the perfect opening night film for this year’s SXSW, where the banquet of action, family drama, and comedy falls right in line with Austin’s motto of “keep it weird.” Indeed, the film is weird—and whether or not that’s your cup of tea, writer-directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert ensure you’ll at least give a slow clap to the artists’ pitch perfect execution of something wholly original.
World premiere in the rearview mirror, A24 quickly took the genre-busting gem to cinemas where it did the unthinkable: impressed finicky critics and theatergoers alike. To date, the film has grossed over $35 million at the domestic box office and that number is only set to grow. It’s well deserved; we may yet be halfway through the year, but this memorable title will be hanging around “Best of” lists for months to come (and longer).
Gender: 5/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES
If you’re like me, you’re collecting intergenerational reconciliation stories starring damaged immigrant women and their daughters. (No? Just me and my group chat?) Everything Everywhere is the latest addition to my folio, tucked neatly next to recent titles like Encanto (2021), Turning Red (2021), and The Farewell (2019). These movies quench like water on Hollywood’s parched earth of stories featuring complicated female relationships, and I could not be more pleased that this trend is taking place across different mediums, with books and TV adaptations hardly spared the cathartic tears this genre can unleash.
In Everything Everywhere, the Daniels cast international superstar Michelle Yeoh as harried laundromat owner Evelyn Wang. Despite Yeoh’s illustrious career that spans decades, including recent works like Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021) or Gunpowder Milkshake (2021), this feels like the first narrative that actually takes advantage of her incredible range, Yes, we’ve seen the Yeoh’s sublime physicality that first put her on the map in Hong Kong, then in the United States with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). And sure, we’ve glimpsed the emotional depth she brings to a single narrowed look in Crazy Rich Asians (2018), while her recurring stint as the Machiavellian Philippa Georgiou in Star Trek: Discovery comes close as one of her more in-depth roles.
But no one’s given her the undivided spotlight she so deserves until now. Yeoh snatches the opportunity and blows it out of the water, forming some of the freshest, most surprising scenes that Hollywood sorely needs more of.
Key to building up the complexity of not just Evelyn, but all the film’s women, are the multitude of relationships that hold them together like an evidence board crisscrossed with yarn. Whether it’s the estrangement Evelyn feels with her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu), which anchors the film’s main story arc, to the sweet support between Joy and her girlfriend Becky Sregor (Tallie Medel) and even the absurdist, Carol-inspired romance between Evelyn and Jamie Lee Curtis’ Deirdre Beaubeirdra, Everything Everywhere has no shortage of deeply flawed but beautiful, strong women.
Race: 5/5
Through an endless array of spot-on details, Everything Everywhere delivers an impeccable mirror to the experience of a Chinese American family living in Southern California. I could harp on all the ways they “made me feel seen” but instead of a massive run-on paragraph, I’ll extract just one topic that spoke to me: its use of code-switching through language.
(Though I will pause to squeal about the rice cooker ditty that plays early on in the first scene. My Zojirushi sings me the same tune to let me know steaming hot rice is ready for me, so needless to say, I have deep wells of emotions associated with the jingle. 🥲)
Basically, it never ceases to delight me when a film accurately captures the organic changes in language and accent that divulge a character’s underlying traits. When Joy is forced by her mother to say hello to her grandfather—or gong gong (James Hong)—and terrible Mandarin comes out with a butchered American accent, I couldn’t help but laugh out loud in recognition. But it’s a slightly bitter laugh, one that highlights the chasm between her and her Cantonese-speaking grandfather, only two generations apart but strangers who can’t communicate. Similarly, my own grandparents only spoke Taiwanese and Japanese, and no matter how much I strengthened the Mandarin I grew up learning, it got me no closer to understanding my older relatives in Taiwan. Such an upbringing that can unmoor a person, and it’s a lonely experience that feels a little less lonely when you get to share it with an entire generation of Americans going through the same thing on screen.
Besides the above, what else can I say that hasn’t already been said more viscerally by two of the film’s main stars? During various interviews, Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan, who plays Evelyn’s husband Waymond, share what Everything Everywhere has meant to them. With Yeoh being a Malaysian woman and Quan, Vietnamese American—both of them ethnically Chinese and working in the film industry since the ‘80s—they’d been underutilized for far too long. Watching their reactions to being given a chance to finally make use of their talents is simply pure:
Bonus for Age: +1.00
Across the Top 100 grossing films of 2021, and of 2020, literally none starred a woman of color age 45 or older in a leading, or even co-leading role. Everything Everywhere will at least put that tally to one film in 2022—a frankly pathetic, but no less important stat in the heel-dragging slog toward Hollywood realizing that women of color (who make up 1 in 5 U.S. residents, mind you) don’t suddenly poof! disappear like a magic trick on their 45th birthday.
In addition to Yeoh, 59, in a leading role, James Hong plays Evelyn’s father. At 93 years old, born in Minneapolis to parents who had emigrated from Hong Kong, it’s exciting to see the Asian American actor (who has over 650 TV and film credits to his name) play a comedic role as the cranky but cool-as-a-cucumber elder. His age is neither ignored, as he uses a wheelchair, nor is it ever used as a punchline as Gong Gong is humanized through flashbacks that key into his difficult relationships with his daughter and son-in-law.
Bonus for LGBTQ: +1.00
You know a film has hit the mark with its LGBTQ representation when headlines from queer outlets like Autostraddle proclaim “‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ Is a Queer Masterpiece of Colossal Sincerity.” In it, Drew Gregory gives us a preview:
You wouldn’t know it from the trailers, but it’s super gay. And I’m not just talking about that woozy feeling you get watching Michelle Yeoh fight. This is an explicitly queer story.
Indeed, the lesbian romance between Joy and Becky provides the foundation for some of the film’s most touching moments. Not only is the young couple normalized in a film that gives humanity to every last character (including a couple rocks), the Daniels layer Asian American and immigrant facets to produce drama that feels incredibly realistic. It doesn’t hurt that authenticity exists among its actors, too, with both Hsu and Sregor being out.
Perhaps Linda Codega puts it best when they say, “I'm just a queer they/them watching my relationship with my mother play out on screen and I'm not crying, you're crying.”
Mediaversity Grade: A+ 5.67/5
I can’t get over how happy I am to see Everything Everywhere All At Once resonate with mainstream audiences. The Daniels may have validated my sense of self with their work, but it’s seeing the stories of Evelyn, Waymond, and Joy Wang finally being treated as universal—something that Domee Shih’s Turning Red unfortunately did not get the benefit of, despite aughts-era boy bands being VERY universal—that feels even better. If only because it means we’ll hopefully get more films starring Yeoh and Quan and Hsu. (Hot dog) fingers crossed.
Like Everything Everywhere All At Once? Try these other off-beat, frenetic titles.
Uncut Gems (2019)
Booksmart (2019)
Knives Out (2019)