Review: Everything Everywhere All At Once
moral tales
I just saw “Everything Everywhere All At Once”. My immediate reaction was that it was quite similar to the movie “It’s A Wonderful Life”, which I saw for the first time last Christmas. “It’s a Wonderful Life” is a very simple moral story. A man down on his luck contemplates suicide, so a guardian angel comes to earth and walks him through a vision quest showing all the good he’s done in his lifetime and how bad the world would be if he hadn’t been there. Once the quest is over, he returns to his life renewed. I didn’t love it initially, but it serves an important place in my consciousness in its strong morality. “Everything Everywhere All At Once” is a similar moral story hidden under some other dimensions.
“Everything Everywhere All At Once” centers an Asian-American immigrant mom named Evelyn who runs a laundromat with her husband. Her relationship with her husband is falling apart and despite his mild manners, he wants a divorce. Her relationship with her daughter Joy is falling apart partially because she doesn’t accept her daughter’s modern sensibilities towards homosexuality or tattoos. And her business is falling apart under tax investigation and inability to turn a profit. With all this swirling around her, as she goes into the IRS building to comply with an investigation she is certain to lose, Evelyn is pulled into a multiverse-wide struggle to stop an interdimensional being who turns out to be her daughter. She leaps between different universes, grabbing superpowers from each one, like kung-fu or chef knife skills or wrestling skills, to use in the primary universe to combat minions of her daughter. As she jumps through multiverses she also learns about the different “lifepaths” she could have taken.
Through these diverging “lifepaths” is where we start to get the “It’s A Wonderful Life” vision quest parallels. The different universes Evelyn jumps through play out as a way for her to revisit the choices she made throughout her life, showing her the other possibilities she had. The choice to marry her husband and start a laundromat with him is the primary “regret”. She’s much more successful, as an actor, as a chef, as a singer, without marrying him. Initially her husband is an active character in the multiverse vision quest, introducing her to the world, but his multiverse commander is killed and he’s left as the original bumbling husband from the first reality. He turns out to be sweet and patient and kind and it’s all her fault he was driven to wanting a divorce.
The other half of the moral vision quest is Evelyn’s relationship with her daughter Joy. Joy is an incredibly powerful multiverse jumper, able to feel every universe at once. She was transformed that way because Evelyn pushed her too hard tiger mom style in a different universe. Joy creates something called the “everything bagel”, a bagel with literally everything on it that collapses under its own weight like a black hole, an okay joke, and wants to use that to kill herself and end the pain of having to experience all these universes. Joy is talked down from the edge by her mother’s acceptance of her and steps out of the black hole at the last minute. The plot warps back to reality and they work to clean up their tax mess and move on with their life.
While universe jumping, Evelyn meets her husband in a reality when she had chosen not to marry him. They’re both extremely successful, but unsatisfied, and he says to her, “In another life, I would have really liked doing laundry and taxes with you”. That’s the moral core of the movie, that there’s inherent validity in what they’ve done, being together, caring for each other, even if it hasn’t been easy and it’s led them to such a painful point.
“Everything Everywhere All At Once” is a lot sillier than “It’s A Wonderful Life”. There’s a universe where people have hot dogs for hands, a universe where rocks talk to each other, a universe where a raccoon controls a chef like the movie Ratatouille. Switching between multiverses to obtain superpowers also involves a “statistical anomaly”, something someone would never normally do, like eating chapstick, which leads to comedic moments like people sticking “Auditor of the Month” trophies in their butts. The tone whiplashed between these comedic moments, superhero-style action scenes, and the serious “It’s A Wonderful Life” emotional core. The silly moments and the action made the movie fun I guess, and they’re very creatively done, but personally I didn’t really care about them. The core of the movie was clearly the “It’s A Wonderful Life” parts with the rest of it as quirky window dressing. But “It’s A Wonderful Life” doesn’t have two real hours of plot either. I can barely remember the first hour of the movie as it’s just extremely repetitive anecdotes showing the kindness the main character has shown his fellow mankind.
I got the feeling that something was wrong here and that’s why I started writing, but it’s hard to stay mad at a movie that wears its heart on its sleeve so openly. Maybe quirky dressing is what people need to watch moral films nowadays. I’m happy people are watching moral films that rejoice in love for the specifics of life. Morality, especially life-affirming morality, is very simple. You don’t need two hours of complex plots to say the words “you should love the life you live in today” but maybe building to “In another life, I would have really liked doing laundry and taxes with you” over two hours is what people want.
Thank you! Just streamed it last light and kept thinking about It's a Wonderful Life as well as The Matrix. But poster below hits another note I agree with. A Christmas Story.
Just watched this movie and had very similar thoughts, except I haven't seen It's a Wonderful Life so the comparison I was thinking about was "A Christmas Story." Apart from the unexceptional comedy/action/aesthetics of the movie (I was almost getting bored by the action scenes, which is obviously not a good sign), the thing that bothered me about it was the language it ultimately used to communicate its message.
The basic idea of the movie, like you said, was of a love-based morality (really a Christian morality, but ofc this movie would never admit that) overcoming pessimistic nihilism. The daughter has lost all sense of meaning and says so many times. Her plan is to find a version of her mother capable of withstanding the "everything, everywhere, all at once" so that she can share her pain with someone else before essentially committing suicide. Her mother, with the help of everyone else in her life(s), doesn't arrive at the same pessimistic conclusion. Instead, she adopts her husband's attitude of fighting through love (literally such a Christian concept it could hardly be more clear).
What I don't like about how this message is communicated is summed up in a line the mother delivers to her daughter in the parking lot. She says "nothing matters" (in a positive way) before giving her daughter a hug at what is basically the apex of the movie. But that isn't the lesson she learned. The lesson she learned was that "it's a wonderful live," that you should appreciate the people you have, the beauty of the world, and act with kindness and love. She learned that the actions she took that were not made out of love, back when she still regretted her life-choices, were hurting other people, people who cared about her, and that that was wrong.
Some things clearly matter, like your actions and the people you love, etc. Expressing it in the whole "nothing matters," "we're all just little shits in the huge universe" way just seems immature and cringey. It makes sense for the daughter to be experiencing that type of nihilism turning her into the villain because she is young and confronted with an overwhelming and confusing world. But the lesson they learned was not that life is pointless, that was literally the opposite of what they learned. They aren't small pieces of shit, they are literally like the most important things in each others lives. The things that don't matter are the material things, like the fact that you're broke in this life when you could have been rich. But life does matter and other people matter a lot and that's precisely the point the movie was making so it annoyed me that it used language that contradicted that. They had basically discovered a universal truth and then said the opposite or something.
Like you said, if this way of communicating the message of love is what gets it across to more people, I suppose that's a good thing. But it bothered me and seemed childish. I understand it comes from this liberal, scientific/atheistic place where they have to say "the universe" when they mean "God" or something, but I don't even care about the religiosity of the movie. It could have been completely atheistic and still used the right (not cringey) language about meaning.