By Sandra Hall
EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE ★★★
(MA) 139 minutes, in cinemas April 14
Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, who co-wrote and directed this film, have a strong taste for the bizarre, coupled with vigorous powers of persuasion.
With their 2016 feature debut Swiss Army Man, they managed to snare Daniel Radcliffe for the role of a corpse. The corpse is eventually revived to the point of learning to talk again, but initially Radcliffe’s only means of communication is an orchestrated series of post-mortem farts. It was a very funny film, but at the time it had me fearing for his future prospects as a leading man.
Michelle Yeoh (left) and Jing Li in a scene from Everything Everywhere All at Once.Credit: AP
For this one, the Daniels (as they’re known) have enlisted Michelle Yeoh and Jamie Lee Curtis in a shambolic sci-fi excursion into the multiverse – a concept rooted in the premise that there are multiple universes where it’s possible to find different versions of ourselves leading alternative lives.
Yeoh’s Evelyn Wang is soon to make this discovery but when the film opens, she’s desperately trying to stay afloat in a sea of bills, paid and unpaid, needed by the tax department, which is where Curtis comes in. Arrayed in a fat suit and a grey bob with fringe, she’s cast as Deirdre Beaubeirdra, the fearsome IRS agent auditing the laundromat owned by Evelyn and her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), who’s no help at all. An incurably sunny optimist, he leaves all the family’s problems to his wife.
Jamie Lee Curtis as an IRS agent in Everything Everywhere All at Once.Credit: AP
Further adding to Evelyn’s woes is their daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu), who has come out as gay and is eager to introduce her girlfriend to the guests invited to that evening’s birthday party for Gong Gong (James Hong), Evelyn’s father. A cranky old autocrat who may not know what a lesbian is, he still has the power to make Evelyn miserable.
The Daniels’ work has often been labelled surreal, a handy word to use when you don’t know what the hell is going on. I prefer to call it hectic. They have spent a lot of their joint career making music videos, and subtlety plays no part in their universe. They’re all about colour and movement, taking special delight in bombarding you with a rainbow of visual effects.
Much of the satire is handled by the costume department, who gleefully seize the challenge by resorting to fancy dress at every opportunity – and there are many.
The pace quickens with a series of flashbacks leading Evelyn to the realisation that she’s spent her life taking wrong turns. She’s now full of regrets, which increase dramatically once she samples the adventures her other selves are experiencing in their universes.
Evelyn’s favourite is one that echoes Yeoh’s real life. In this universe, Evelyn’s counterpart is a glamorous film star at the premiere of her latest film. What’s more, she’s being romanced by a much cooler version of Waymond, who confuses things even more by popping up in the plot in yet another guise. In this iteration of himself he’s a kind of inter-universe tour guide given the job of keeping Evelyn up to speed on the dizzying narrative going on in her head.
Yeoh anchors the whole thing with her intelligence and Quan, best known for his part in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, makes very deft work of Waymond’s changes of identity.
There are laughs to be had, many of them supplied by Curtis, who takes great pleasure in playing the heavy. She throws herself into the fray with an enthusiasm that has Yeoh unpacking her martial arts skills, and the film’s unadulterated silliness has an oddball appeal if you can adjust to the rate of its convolutions.
Propelling the action is Joy, who’s revealed to be a particularly important entity in the other universes, having managed to roll all her selves into one omnipotent little package.
But it all unfolds in a style that suggests the visuals came first and the story was shaped to suit. It ends on a peculiarly schmaltzy note at odds with the anarchic style of all that has gone before.
When it was over, all I felt was a faint sense of wonder. It seemed an exhausting way to put across a very familiar idea – that we’d all be a lot happier if we could be kind to one another.
A cultural guide to going out and loving your city. Sign up to our Culture Fix newsletter here.