The circle of Everything Everywhere All the Time surrounds Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh), a Chinese immigrant in Southern California who’s become the exhausted, micro-managing proprietress of a laundromat business she inherited from her father (James Hong). Awash in business problems, she meets with a cantankerous IRS agent (Jamie Lee Curtis), who gives Evelyn a hard time…and a hard deadline for getting her affairs in order. But an audit isn’t Evelyn’s biggest problem, by far, as she’s thrown into a sprawling, mind-blowing comedically cosmic adventure that plugs her into all the other parallel lives she’s ever lived, across the universe—and in other universes, too. And she learns she’s been chosen to lead the resistance against an omnipresent dark force threatening to destroy the entire omniverse, which links everything, everywhere, all the time. You’ve probably seen Yeoh, who parlayed her success as a Hong Kong action star to noteworthy supporting roles in the Hollywood mainstream, in movies including Last Christmas and Crazy Rich Asians, and in TV’s Star Trek: Discovery franchise. But this marks her first leading role in an American film, and she totally rocks it, grounding the serio-comic shenanigans in a character who creates the zippy, zappy center of every scene. Evelyn is a woman who’s told she’s been a failure, at least on the surface, at most everything she’s ever tried to do. Now she has an opportunity for success in a most spectacular fashion. Stephanie Hsu, who played Mai on The Marvelous Ms. Maisel, is Evelyn’s daughter, Joy, whose sunny name belies an inner misery and some serious multi-dimensional clouds. You might recognize Ke Huy Quan, who does a bravura job as Waymand, Evelyn’s husband. (As a child actor, Quan played Short Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Data in Goonies.) He may seem like a milquetoast, happy-go-lucky husband, but wait until you see Waymand’s parallel selves—as a multiverse warrior and strategist, or a debonair, handsome hunk—and how he can turn even an innocuous fanny pack into a fierce fighting tool. Scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis—the veteran star of the original Halloween, plus more than 80 other movie and TV projects—camps it up as a frumpy government employee in one universe while pursuing a much more sinister agenda in another. Worlds collide in a wild, frenetic, crossover mishmash as Evelyn finds herself morphing in and out of multiple versions of herself—as a chef, a prison con, a movie star and singer, a kung-fu expert, a dominatrix and even a piñata and a sentient rock. The filmmaking team of directors Kwan and Scheinert, who collaborate as The Daniels, create a breathless explosion of riotous metaphysical mayhem as she zips and zaps her way across dozens of other parallel “existences” to fulfill her destiny. The theme isn’t exactly a new one; other films have aggressively tweaked our perceptions of reality, like The Matrix, Inception, The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai and Time Bandits. But none of those films has as much unhinged, unruly playfulness as this one, with a raccoon food maestro, a weaponized lap dog (within a frisky cameo by comedian Jenny Slate), people with hot dogs for fingers and a couple of outrageously salacious gags involving sex toys. Nor have other movies ever noted the multidimensional benefits of paper cuts, eating lip balm, sitting on the crack between couch cushions and reusing chewing gum. This far-out film has all that, and much more. All the chaos revolves around a soft, sentimental center grounded in marriage, mothers and daughters, kindness and the power of love, and pushing aggressively against the cultural bias of favoring boys over girls, men over women. (In a flashback scene to Eveyln’s birth in China, a nurse announces her arrival, knowing how deeply disappointed her father will be that his new child isn’t a male. “I’m so sorry,” he’s told.) But Evelyn busts that bias, smashes it to smithereens and drags it all over the omniverse, doing something that no one else—including men—could do, and doing it on a celestial scale. And she learns that that every decision we make, anything we do or don’t do, creates new destiny pathways branching off from one life course and forging another. “Every rejection, every disappointment,” Evelyn is told, “has led you here.” Where you’ve been, in other words, determines where you are, repeatedly and symmetrically, like expanding rings of ripples in the expansive waters of an endless sea. Look closely and you’ll spot all the circles and round forms conspicuously sprinkled throughout the movie—mirrors, pots and pan lids, cookies, Chinese lanterns, stick-on goo-goo eyes, washing-machine windows, something on a piece of paper boldly, emphatically circled with dark ink. And at the center of it all: a monstrously big bagel. And like a bagel, yes, this gloriously bonkers blitzkrieg goes round and round, with a hole in the middle—a hole that Evelyn’s destined to fill. At the journey’s end, there she is, where she was at the beginning; she’s ’verse-hopped all around the cosmos, but her path brought her back around to her laundromat and left her with this blissful, all-encompassing thought. “There is always something to love,” she says. “Even in a universe where we have hot dogs for fingers. Next, The 100 Best Movies of All Time
