Everything, Everywhere, All At Once: What Could Have Been, What Is, and What We Make
First of all, 11/10 movie. It was funny, charming, ridiculous at times, heart-throbbing, and like Turning Red, it punched me right in my unresolved, Asian girl “mommy issues.” The infamous stereotype (and reality) of Asian “Tiger Parenting” deserves many conversations and Everything, Everywhere, All At Once adds something exceptional to the discourse, because its protagonist is an immigrant mother, Evelyn, played by the elegant and hilarious Michelle Yeoh (Crazy Rich Asians, Shang Chi). It’s a perfect “post-pandemic” film and it deserves all the applause.
The sci-fi, adventure, vaguely magical realism film follows Evelyn, her husband Waymond (played by Ke Huy Quan, Data from The Goonies!), and their adult daughter, Joy (played by Stephanie Hsu). The family lives a seemingly normal life in the US with a failing laundromat business that is being audited and a set of divorce papers that are ready to be served. An interdimensional rupture suddenly interrupts reality, and Evelyn is the only person who can put the multiverse back together again. Throughout the movie, she sees different life paths that she could have had if she had made different decisions and she must navigate them all to restore balance.
I resonate so deeply with many aspects of the film, and I think everyone can, especially coming out of (or going back into?) a pandemic. I’ve spent a lot of time in the past two years thinking of all the things I could have done, and all the places I could have been if we were not in lockdown. The characters in the film wonder the same things as us, namely, “When will we get back to how it was supposed to be?”
On a bigger level, I know my mom and dad think about what their lives could have been if they stayed in their home countries. Would it have been better? Would they have followed their real dreams? My mother left behind a posh lifestyle, a fiancé, and a teaching degree to move to Canada, where she is now a stay-at-home mom in the depths of Southern Ontario suburbia, in a thoroughly middle-class life. I—like so many children of immigrants—can feel the resentment sometimes and the envy our parents might feel as they watch us live freely in worlds they made possible.
Michelle Yeoh’s performance as Evelyn was brilliant. Yeoh captured the blunt and perhaps rude humour of immigrant parents who will never hesitate to comment on your weight. She portrayed the complexity of being a child and a parent—ah yes, intergenerational trauma!—and as a first-generation Canadian watching, she reminded me that my mother is human too; prone to mistakes and patterns, feeling just as much as I do without the tools to properly express it all, and the ultimate burden of all immigrants: trying to make something out of nothing.
The film’s costumes, set designs, and action scenes were all out of this world, with nods to legendary martial arts movies, Asian street fashion, and an almost boyish sense of humour. The writing was sharp, the jokes were a mix of witty and slapstick. I was so grateful for the appreciation of how funny Asian and first-gen culture can be without it being racist. Featuring an almost all-Asian cast, Everything, Everywhere, All At Once still found ways to be deeply relatable, appealing, and charming for people of all audiences (my theater was mostly white folks and the laughter was loud and, yes, they clapped at the end).
This film feels so deeply personal to me. I’ve never seen a film—let alone an adventure film—with a 59-year-old Asian woman lead. Evelyn’s character was flawed, lovable, and brave. All the characters were so dimensional and familiar and yet they still surprised me. Everything, Everywhere, All At Once was an experience, a true masterpiece, and I could not recommend it enough. Without spoiling too much, I will say that it reminded me that life, no matter how grand or lacking, is what we make of it. The little things only matter if we let them matter. And truly, we are the masters of our own destinies, making the lives we want with the choices we make.
Cover Photo by A24. Edited by Madison Case.
