Everything Everywhere All At Once

I am so late to this. I did see it before the Oscars, and suffice it to say I'm pleased with the extremely positive reception of the film and its performances because in a very real sense this is one of the best crafted pieces of cinema I've seen in a while.

And at the very least for Michelle Yeoh to not win a Best Actress award over this would have been a travesty.

Now, I say "best crafted" for a couple of reasons. First, yes, the movie is well made. But it's not perfect, and certainly doesn't have the broadest appeal, and while the story it tells is outstanding it's not exactly unprecedented in its broader strokes and overall isn't super complex. But perhaps more importantly I say "best crafted" because everything about the movie feels like just that; crafted. There is so much strangeness on display here that you can't help but think that for everything to not completely fly off the rails it all had to be placed with extreme precision. The last movie I saw that felt this precise was Dune, and even when compared to that level of craft I feel like the density of stuff in Everything Everywhere All At Once is noteworthy.

Which is to say yes, EEAAO (what an abbreviation) is, despite the simplicity of the character arcs and central conflict, extremely dense and deeply strange. I recognize this is going to narrow the broad appeal of the movie quite a bit, but even if you don't like the strangeness I don't think anyone would argue that it didn't feel entirely deliberate. And for my part the strangeness was a draw. I am all about movies doing unexpected things, especially when those unexpected things are so utterly unique and tend toward overt silliness, as they do here. In fact, EEAAO manages a particularly strange trick in modern cinema.

You see, in general most stories can be likened to a painting. From a distance it appears a coherent, original idea, but if you look closely you can see it's made up of nothing but a thousand individual brush strokes. Someone familiar with the common brush strokes of cinema would be able to tell you where else you might look to see very familiar strokes, as if the final work was made up of nothing but the familiar brush work of a thousand other movies. But EEAAO flips that on its head. Anyone familiar with basic storytelling can take a broad look at the movie and tell you where else you can find similar tales of generational trauma, familial discontent, and cultural diaspora. It's almost as if the painting is nothing but broad brush strokes. But as you look more closely, you realize that the brush strokes of this movie aren't brush strokes at all, but in fact a thousand tiny utterly unique pictures crammed together to form the appearance of the broad strokes that were just identified.

That lends a detail and freshness to the broader themes of this movie that, at least to me, make the resolutions at the end hit even harder. There are plenty of more straightforward films about diaspora, trauma, family troubles, immigration, and financial stress. But the deep strangeness and extreme density of EEAAO packages those themes up in a way more engaging fashion than anything before it. At least, to me.

So yes, I did see this best picture winner, with performances by a best actress, best supporting actress, and best supporting actor, and came out of it agreeing with all the future accolades it would eventually wind up winning. That's fairly unusual for me, but given everything else perhaps the strangest thing about Everything Everywhere All At Once is this; it managed to present a stranger multiverse than a much higher budget film that had both the words strange and multiverse right in the title.

Well done indeed.