LOS ANGELES — It will surprise few people and interest fewer to hear that the motion picture academy’s choice for best picture of the year was a far cry from my own. That happens most years anyway, and it’s long been the prerogative (some would say the obligation) of film critics and Oscar voters to disagree. And from the moment it appeared on the scene, “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s frenzied mashup of immigrant fable, martial-arts spectacular, cosmological slapstick and multiverse-spanning group hug, has provoked more than its share of disagreement.
Did I say disagreement? More like the kind of rancor that can thrive only in the hothouses of social media, where a movie about the importance of kindness somehow provokes some of the more hostile cinephile debates in recent memory. Had Daniels, as Kwan and Scheinert bill themselves, thrillingly rejuvenated the motion-picture medium, or had they turned out something so exhaustingly frenetic as to verge on unwatchable (at least in one sitting)? In concocting a genuine word-of-mouth theatrical hit (with more than $100 million worldwide, it’s by far A24’s biggest success), had they singularly disproved the theory that Hollywood originality is dead, or had they inadvertently confirmed it by making a derivative Marvel-adjacent superhero movie in indie drag?
I’ve been asking myself these and other questions since last March, not long after “Everything Everywhere All at Once” premiered at the SXSW Film Festival and unfurled the story — or stories — of Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh), a dismally unfulfilled Chinese American laundromat owner who saves the multiverse by harnessing the power of many, vastly more successful parallel-universe Evelyns and enacting momentous reconciliations with her long-suffering husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan); her estranged lesbian daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu); her perpetually disappointed father (James Hong); and even her alternately grouchy and murderous IRS auditor, Deirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis). Reviewing the movie at the time, I filed an admiring but ambivalent notice that seems a tad mealymouthed in retrospect: “I don’t know if this movie fully works in this universe, but I suspect it might in the next.”
