The first time I watched Everything Everywhere All At Once, I cried during most of the 29-minute car ride home. It had been one week since I had flown back to California from Brazil. My sister and my mom took me to the airport to say goodbye after my two-month stay in my native country. We spent hours at the airport waiting in the food court, sharing an ovomaltine milkshake and teasing each other in the special way we developed while living together in Ipanema when my sister and I were teenagers. It was a bittersweet moment of release in which we appreciated each other and enjoyed nostalgic closeness after a trip filled with emotionally draining family meetings. Their relationship was strained, with both sides feeling misunderstood and unseen. My sister felt torn between her life with her girlfriend and her relationship with my mother and I was doing my best to broker peace and build bridges, as well as dealing with my own difficulties relating to my role in the family dynamics. It was the kind of situation where everyone was making an effort to reconcile but everyone was hurting and feeling rejected. In the midst of this pain, the two of them often found it easier to take some time apart than to keep trying, but the time apart, while important for self-protection, hurt too. After a lot of difficult catharsis and crucial talks of the heart, the milkshake at the airport was a reward and a reminder of why we keep showing up to do that emotional work, even when we don’t know how to move forward.
In Everything Everywhere All at Once, Michelle Yeoh and Stephanie Hsu play a mother and daughter going through a similar conflict, with such a graceful attention to the pain of intergenerational misunderstanding that watching them work through it in the movie felt like going to therapy. And while I would say that the need for those characters to find unity is the emotional core of the movie, it is only one of many themes woven into the story. While the title might suggest that it is about everything everywhere all at once, I would say it is closer to being about figuring out how to deal with being exposed to everything, everywhere, all at once.
At the beginning of the movie, the main characters each have their own ways of dealing with it all, the everything. Evelyn, the matriarch, has been busy making sure things don’t fall apart for many years. She runs their laundromat, she cooks, she organizes a new year’s party at the laundromat for their local community, she files the taxes, she tells her daughter what to do with her life and she decides whether or not they will tell Joy’s grandfather, Gong Gong (James Hong), that she has a girlfriend. She is constantly giving directions, but she is not paying attention to the needs of the individuals around her (or to her own). Her husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) wants everyone to be happy, and because of this he has secretly prepared divorce papers that he is planning on giving to Evelyn, because he can see they are unhappy in their current life and is willing to try anything that might help his family heal. Meanwhile, Joy, their daughter, is tired of her mother’s refusal to openly acknowledge her relationship with her girlfriend Becky (Tallie Medel) and is feeling nihilism and despair as she becomes increasingly hopeless that her mother will ever listen to or see her. Joy’s despair also stems from feelings of self-doubt and failure, heightened by her mother’s constant criticism.
One of the details Evelyn hasn’t been paying attention to as she tries to carry her family on her shoulders is the amount of personal purchases she has filed as work expenses on her taxes, and the family business is now being audited by the IRS. It is during this pivotal visit to the IRS building that the movie veers from family drama to sci-fi. Evelyn is contacted by a character from a parallel universe, an alternate reality version of her husband Waymond. He calls himself “Alpha Waymond” since he comes from the “Alpha” universe, and has taken over her husband’s body to pass along a message: reality is being threatened by a villainous agent of multiversal chaos who has created a black hole facsimile with the power to destroy all of existence and she is the only one who can stop them. Once she embarks on that journey, the movie becomes a full-on action-adventure, borrowing heavily from the structure of The Matrix (1999) to tell a multiversal hero’s journey in which Evelyn plays the Chosen One.
But unlike self-serious action movies that are all about looking cool and kicking ass, EEAAO uses silliness as its main aesthetic for the entirety of the sci-fi plot. In order to “download” martial arts abilities (like in The Matrix) the protagonists have to perform an action so unlikely that it will slingshot their consciousness to a reality in which they know martial arts, so they can bring their other self’s knowledge back with them once they force their mind to return to its original universe. This means that every time they need to fight, they have to do things like give themselves a papercut between every finger on their left hand or chug a 2-liter bottle of orange soda. The main villain, Jobu Tobacki, is supposed to represent chaos incarnate, and their outfit changes every few seconds. Some of their many costumes include a jumpsuit à la Elvis in Vegas and an anime cosplay outfit complete with a giant alien gun held effortlessly over the shoulder. The importance given to the scenes set in the universe where everyone has hot dogs for fingers is a great example of the film’s dedication to this aesthetic.
The silliness of the movie ties into one of its main themes: faced with the infinite grandness of the universe, taking yourself too seriously is absurd. Since we are all equally unimportant in the grand scheme of things, everyone’s experience is equally valid and deserving of attention, regardless of whether it seems odd, humorous, grotesque or just generally different from yours. While the action-minded characters from the Alpha universe are certain that killing Jobu Tobacki is the only way to prevent the destruction of all reality, the movie proposes that working through personal differences in order to find mutual understanding—no matter how difficult that process may be—is the better way to save the world. The fully-realized version of Evelyn at the end of her journey is not one who has outsmarted and overpowered the villain, but one who has undergone personal growth by facing her own shortcomings, choosing at last to listen to the people in her family who have been longing to be heard, and seeing every person’s individuality not as a reason for conflict but as a reason to be together.
In the end, this movie is a celebration of the little things, of the ways we are all unique, and of finding in this infinite variety joy. Whether it’s in a husband’s habit of putting googly eyes on all the inanimate objects in the house, getting a car ride from your daughter’s girlfriend to your IRS audit, or trying to split an ovomaltine milkshake equally into three cups while sitting at the airport food court, not wanting to say goodbye.