Our Longing for Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

 

How did I end up crying and rather overwhelmed by the intense feelings flowing through me at a breathtaking speed in a movie that includes people with hot dog fingers, two rocks with googly eyes talking to one another, and a racoon inside a chef’s hat? I guess it’s because we’re in the 21^st century and we swipe through a world that is everything, everywhere, all at once, and yet it is also still one made up of everyday tasks and multiple demands on our time, a marriage crumbling, the difficulty communicating between generations, especially within immigrant families who have grown up in radically different cultures and realities. It’s having to pay taxes even when debt threatens to consume us, and above all wondering what life would have been like if we’d made different choices.

I am always impressed by artists who have the wisdom and feelings of experience when they’re still too young to have accumulated it through living. It’s like that amazing Pink Floyd song, Time, in which then 27 year old David Gilmore wrote “And then one day you find ten years have got behind you. No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.” The “Daniels" are like this. Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, the 34- and 35-year-old directors of Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, seem to know what it’s like to be 60 year old Evelyn Wang (played majestically by the wonderful Michelle Yeoh) an overwhelmed immigrant woman struggling to keep her house and laundry in order, the taxes paid, and her relationships with her elderly Chinese father, aching husband, and young gay daughter. She is coasting along in a culture that is still foreign to her, feeling she’s drowning in a world that seems to be moving at an impossible pace to keep up with.

Stephanie Hsu as Jobu Tupaki

So, then there’s the multiverse. Of course there is. We’re too much of a modern, tech ridden, global world with an understanding not only of what’s happening to our beloved and only home but also that our planet can’t be all there is in the universe, and that the lives we live also contain those we could have lived. There is space, again, for everything, everywhere, all at once, and the Daniels have brought it to the screen. In the end, only we can make sense of what is, what was, and what could have been in order to aching, longing, and lovingly live.

The cast the Daniels direct to tell this multi-layered, multiverse story couldn’t be stronger or better. All Academy Award worthy! Along side Michelle Yeoh is Stephanie Hsu who plays Joy Wang, Evelyn’s daughter. She is the also much feared Jobu Tupaki in the other universes, threatening to destroy everything through her pain. Ke Huy Quan is Waymond Wang, Evelyn’s sweet, lovely, lonely and confused husband. Then there is the quite legendary actor James Hong as Gong Gong, Evelyn’s father. Jamie Lee Curtis is unrecognizable as Deirdre Beaubeirdre, transformed into the monstrous tax agent and most certainly a woman we’ve met before in one immigration or tax office or another.

Ke Huy Quan, Michelle Yeoh, and James Hong

The Daniel’s script is worthy of many awards for its creativity, its reach, but especially for the depth of feelings it captures. Jobu Tupaki, who carries the wrath of misunderstanding, of living in a world of parental expectations and disappointments, of hurt, says in her destruction of the universe, “If nothing matters, then all the pain and guilt you feel for making nothing of your life goes away.” Such depths of despair! Then along comes Waymond Wang, who wins the battle for us all with his formula for life, “The only thing I do know is that we have to be kind. Please, be kind. Especially when we don't know what's going on (…) You think because I’m kind that it means I'm naive, and maybe I am. It's strategic and necessary. This is how I fight.”

Indeed!

This is how we should all fight.