One of my favorite columns on the all-too-short-lived The Dissolve (a site now living on somewhat via Substack’s
) was called One Year Later. The idea was to “look back at the most hyped and heavily discussed movie of this month one year ago, consider its reception at that time, and examine how it holds up today, free of expectations.”With the Academy Awards set to crown a new champion today, I thought it made sense to revisit how I’m feeling about last year’s winner Everything Everywhere All at Once in the spirit of the One Year Later column. (It’s more like two years given how early in 2022 the film was released. Nonetheless.)
I never formally reviewed the film, so I only have a few small pieces of evidence to document my contemporaneous feelings on the film. First, there’s the introduction to the interview I did for Slant Magazine with the Daniels. (Side note: still wild to me that I talked to the Oscar winners for Best Director the year they pulled it off!)
After their film Swiss Army Man, in which Daniel Radcliffe further distanced himself from his Harry Potter persona by playing a flatulent corpse, the bar was high for directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (a.k.a. Daniels) to elevate their wondrous brand of whimsical, satiric surrealism. Their joint follow-up, Everything Everywhere All At Once, delivers on their singular fusion of spectacle, silliness, and sincerity. With the label A24’s patronage of the project, Kwan and Scheinert had enough budget to fully realize some of their most imaginative cinematic fantasies—of which there are many—without exploiting the endless possibilities of the multiverse for spinoff properties.
Within the heady construct of a multiversal story, Daniels locate the grounded story of Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh), a hardworking mother, wife, daughter, and business owner who feels as if she’s lost any sense of control over her life. That is, until, visitors from a timeline known as the “Alphaverse” open Evelyn’s eyes to a world of cosmic connections within which she must protect her priorities. The journey to save her daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), ultimately forces Evelyn to confront that something greater than personal enmity divides them. A larger generational gap separates old-fashioned Evelyn from Joy the digital native, who sees the randomness of the world she inherits through a lens of intractable nihilism.
Second, there’s my blurb for the film in my comprehensive Best Picture ranking (I have it at #17 before Oppenheimer inevitably wins tonight):
Everything Everywhere All At Once is a perfect representation of 2022 in cinema — the only vantage point we have on it at the time of this writing. The directing duo Daniels explodes the omnipresent multiverse concept, finding a logical entry point through the plot and then exploring its full range of possibilities aesthetically and emotionally. In a year full of bloated runtimes (call it the mini-series effect), the filmmakers make a compelling case for the value of a maximalism that trusts audiences can follow wild twists of time and narrative. Their skeleton key is rooting the journey of an exhausted immigrant mother (Michelle Yeoh’s singular Evelyn) in a sincerity of spirit and a trust that, even when unexplainable, there’s a design to the maddening mess of the universe.
I rewatched the film again this week. (It’s now streaming on Netflix.) How’d a year and change treat it?
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