Everything Everywhere All at Once
Everything: meals, bills, raccoons, bagels, grandfathers, mothers, fathers, daughters, laundry, taxes. Everywhere: now, yesterday, tomorrow, on the road you took (or were forced to take) and on the road not taken. All at Once. This film is a fever pitch, a whirling dervish of “how did I get here” and “what if.” At once comedy and tragedy and science fiction and fantasy and horror and realism, a mesmerizing, overwhelming, visceral vision of a life, a world, a universe hurtling out of control, toward the unknown. I thought of Wordsworth’s “The World is Too Much with Us”; I thought of Marlow’s observation in “Heart of Darkness” that “we live in the flicker”; I thought of Borges’s “Garden of Forking Paths,” a multiverse of worlds that split, intersect, loop, or dead end; I thought of a professor talking once about Poe and dreams - of the dream world as an alternate plane of existence, a reality of the surreal; I thought of Hamlet being and not being, fearful of “what dreams may come” should he “shuffle off this mortal coil.” And in the quiet coda of the final twenty minutes, I thought of all those mundane things we take for granted - all those things dead Emily realizes she misses in the final act of “Our Town”; all those things Bobby needs to make him feel alive in “Company”; all those things I have and never actively consider: a comfortable sofa, a warm bed, hot meals, silly pets, fresh flowers, and - most importantly - someone (@tmaxwelljones) to share it all with, even when none of it makes sense. Bring out the Oscars for Best Director (The Daniels), Best Editing, Best Actress Michelle Yeoh (a marvel, literally doing everything - all the emotions - all at once), Best Supporting Actor Ke Huy Quan (truly a revelation - especially if you only remember him from “Indiana Jones” or “The Goonies”), Best Supporting Actress Stephanie Hsu (finding the convergence of the fantastical and the real), and - if the stars align - Best Picture. You will have never seen a film like this - and you won’t stop thinking about it once you’ve seen it.
