“Everything Everywhere All at Once” (finally) blew my mind

Published 3:45 pm Wednesday, March 22, 2023

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I never thought I’d be thanking the Academy, but the way “Everything Everywhere All at Once” cleaned up on Oscars night March 12 prompted my wife, visiting mother-in-law and I to finally watch it this past Sunday night. We needed something to chase down the deep-dish pizza we’d made for dinner. In recent weeks, Sundays had been reserved for “The Last of Us,” but that wrapped up with the release of this season’s final episode on the same day as the Oscars.

So we went ahead and bought “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” whose title my wife mangled once or twice: “Everything Everywhere All the Time.” Twenty bucks later, we now own it, which is good, because I will need at least 17 repeat viewings to fully comprehend it.

To be clear, it was a really good film. Those two things are not mutually exclusive, goodness and confusion, or humans would never survive.

And the Oscars for Michelle Yeow, Ke Huy Quan and Jamie Lee Curtis were well-earned.

(Warning: Possible spoilers.)

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During an IRS audit courtesy of Curtis, Yeow’s Evelyn is summoned through the multiverse, where another her, in the Alphaverse, has figured out how to navigate the multiverse. I know, multiverse films have been done to death in recent years, but this isn’t one of those kinds of films.

Warning, it IS one of those films that thumbs its nose at our shortened, social media-saturated attention spans, but don’t let the 2 hour, 19-minute running time frighten you away from this fine work from the Daniels, aka directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert.

At one point during the film, a few fight sequences in, my wife asked me if I knew it was going to have so much fighting. I did not, I grunted, eyes affixed, drinking in the gorgeous violence. I had known only that it was a head-tripping science fiction film about a family coming unmoored in the multiverse. The well-choreographed action was a bonus.

The plot was one you could get lost trying to analyze, much less explain in the length of a column, but we just rolled with it as the movie plowed toward its emotionally rich conclusion, which reduced us to tears.

It ended up being both an interdimensional science fiction film and a stunning mother-daughter tale, replete with a very important everything bagel and plenty of comedic moments.

It’s also the kind of film that will stick with you and will have you thinking about Evelyn as a multitasking wife and mother enduring a grueling audit for the family laundromat. As the mother of our three daughters, my wife found it more than a little compelling.

“When we focus on everything we could be, all the possibilities, all the potential outcomes, all the paths that take us places we may or may not want to go, we miss the joy and wonder of the path we are on — and break our own spirits,” she told me. “And the heartbreaking this is we can do this to our own children by seeing all the potential but not the actual kid.”

There are layers to this ultimately hopeful film. It is one of those films where you feel a little better off having watched it than before. So I’d like to thank the Academy. Sometimes it’s annoying when the ceremony skews so heavily in favor of a single film. Heck, I’m still mad about 2004, when Sean Penn beat Bill Murray out for a Best Actor Oscar when they were up for “Mystic River” and “Lost in Translation,” respectively.

I haven’t seen all of this year’s Best Picture nominees, but in some universe, I have. Maybe I’ll get around to them in this one, but they’d have to be pretty darned great to have been more deserving than “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”

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