"Everything Everywhere All at Once" Lives Up to its Title

The film Everything Everywhere All At Once lives up to its title, but all its multiverses and martial arts melées center on a single moment.

[PHOTO Collage: Poster art by James Jean; Stephanie Hsu, Michelle Yeoh, and Ke Huy Quan; Jamie Lee Curtis]

In that moment, we're at the laundry run by Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh} and her hapless husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan). The grown up daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) has fled in anger and frustration from a confrontation with her mother over Joy's coming out. Evelyn yells for her to wait, she has something important to say. When they're face to face, Hsu shows Joy's need for her mother to say something that might bring some kind of healing, and we see in Yeoh's face that Evelyn searches for the right words. Then she chooses to say something else.

A new universe forms for every road not taken, physicists tell us. The premise of the movie is that Evelyn, who regrets so many choices in her life, is the churning center of hundreds of multiverses, all of which are in danger from a mysterious mastermind who has created an instrument of universal destruction. For both the multiverse and for her family, only Evelyn can save the day.

She has to "jump" from universe to universe, a process initiated by making unlikely choices, like putting shoes on the wrong feet, or eating lip balm. The laughs and the ecchh factor increase as each jump requires a more bizarre choice.

The writer-directors Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert told NPR that the universe story is a metaphor for the family story. So even when we're laughing, the gravity of that one moment is still pulling on our emotions.  Yeoh says that she cried when she read the script, because in her forty year career, she hasn't had this kind of opportunity to show off the range of what she can do.  Costar Ke Huy Quan said much the same thing, his opportunities having dried up soon after his debut as the precocious kid in the second Lost Ark movie.

Quan plays Waymond Wang, Evelyn's guide to the multiverse. At the start, he's kind-hearted, goofy, and regretful that he disappoints her -- just as her father had warned he would do when the couple eloped. At unexpected moments, he's taken over by Waymond of the Alpha-universe, a commando who fights off attackers with just a fanny pack. In the universe where young Evelyn listened to her parents, he's a suave but lonely billionaire. But in every incarnation, his spirit is expressed by the goofy Waymond who pleads with Evelyn, "Please be kind."

I didn't recognize glamorous Jamie Lee Curtis in the role of Deirdre, the IRS auditor who'll seize the Wangs' business unless she gets straight answers from Evelyn about back taxes. Pursuing Evelyn from world to world, Deirdre goes from harried bureaucrat to something like the Terminator to a kittenish lover who plays Debussy with her toes. Curtis looks like she's having a blast.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is overwhelming at first. We learn how to watch the movie as we go. Its Wizard of Oz structure helps: It starts at home with the family in an uproar, goes to whirlwind of outlandish places, and comes back.

The fun that everyone had making the film shows to the audience, and is shared.