Is Everything Everywhere All At Once the greatest movie ever made?
Genre: Drama/Action/Sci-Fi
Premise: While being audited by the IRS at their offices, a laundry store owner is forced to access the multi-verse to save her broken family.
About: After the Daniels made Swiss Army Man, everybody wanted them, including Marvel. The Daniels don’t do anything, however, unless they can do everything. And Marvel’s offer came with those Marvel handcuffs. So after rebuffing Marvel, they finally put this movie together, getting A24 to finance it. Testing just how inclusive New Hollywood is, the Daniels made a 60 year old Asian woman their lead character. The film has been doing better than any indie film over the last three pandemic-infused years, taking in nearly 20 million dollars at the box office. It currently holds a near-impossible 8.9 IMDB rating (for reference, the universally loved Spider Man No Way Home holds an 8.4 and Oscar-winning Coda holds an 8.0).
Writers: The Daniels
Details: 2 hours and 30 minutes
This movie is so weird.
And so cool.
And so unique.
And makes you feel so many things.
Even if you go beyond the story itself, there are crazy things to talk about in this movie.
As I was watching it, I kept having these, “wait a minute” moments. “Wait a minute, is that Jamie Lee Curtis?” “Wait a minute, is that the kid from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom?? In a co-starring role???” “Wait a minute, is Jenny Slate really in a fight scene where she’s using her dog on a leash as nunchucks?”
For those who don’t know anything about this movie, it’s about an older laundry store owner, Evelyn, whose being audited by the IRS. The whole family, which includes her gay daughter she disapproves of, Joy, her wimpy husband she doesn’t love anymore, Waymond, and her crusty old father, Gong, go downtown to the IRS Center together to plead their case.
On the way there, Waymond transforms into a smooth decisive version of himself and informs Evelyn that he is not the real Waymond but a different Waymond from another universe and Evelyn is in imminent danger. They must rendezvous in the janitor’s closet and he will explain more there.
Once in the closet, Waymond explains the incredibly complex (but awesome) rules of the multi-verse, in which there are an unlimited number of other universes with different versions of you, each of which you have the power to access (via a ridiculous yet specific triggering act). So if there’s another version of Evelyn who can sing, she can access that singer and sing. If there’s another version of Evelyn who knows kung-fu, she can access that kung-fu and fight.
When the IRS agent (Jamie Lee Curtis) interrupts their meeting and tries to kill Evelyn (since she’s actually another version of the IRS agent from a different universe), Evelyn is forced into action. The family dips in and around the IRS office, where more and more people from other universes inhabit the people in this building, all of whom are determined to take down Evelyn.
The person who’s controlling all of this is someone named Jobu, who happens to be none other than Joy, Evelyn’s daughter! Joy has come to this universe to destroy her mother, just as she has destroyed all her mothers across all the universes. Evelyn is now tasked with killing her own daughter or finding a way to save her while preventing Joy from killing her. She must achieve this while avoiding an all-knowing all-seeing Oz-like bagel (an “Everything” bagel), which has the power to destroy all versions of both Joy and Evelyn. Talk about a tall task!
Anybody who knows me knows I hate complex stuff. Incredibly complex rules. Complex plots. Complex character storylines. Complex mythologies. I hate it.
All that goes out the window with the Daniels.
I don’t know what it is these two do differently – although I suspect drugs are involved – but despite an overwhelming amount of complexity, their movie still works. And I’ve been thinking about that for the six hours since I saw the movie, trying to figure out why they’re able to pull this off where so many others fail at it.
I think I know the answer.
Their stories are always rooted in CHARACTER and EMOTION. And not passively. Emotion is the core of their films. Both this and Swiss Army Man are about people. In this case, it’s about a mother who doesn’t understand her daughter’s life choices. And it’s about that mother’s father who doesn’t understand his daughter’s life choices. And it’s about this woman checking out of her own marriage with this man who loves her.
Despite a fight that includes two men with butt plugs inserted in their butts, despite a subplot that involves a cook who secretly keeps a raccoon under his chef’s hat who helps him prepare his food, despite a major emotionally-intense scene taking place between two rocks with googly eyes that speak to each other in subtitles… this movie always comes back to the broken family and the attempt for them to reconnect and understand one another.
If there’s a lesson to take from this movie, take that lesson. Readers will let you go hog wild as long as you create characters we care about who have unresolved relationships with each other, that you then explore in an honest way (make their interactions feel like real life, not like soap operas). If you do that, you can get as crazy as you want, which this movie does.
Take the way you access your powers in this script. Remember, in the Matrix, you just dialed up your operator and asked him to upload a “helicopter pilot” program so you could fly a helicopter. Here, it’s way more involved. The way that the universes are connected is so complex that, to access them, you need to do very specific weird nonsensical things that the operator tells you to do, as randomness is the only way for the complex universes to connect to and access one another. So, for example, in one scene where Waymond needs fighting skills, he’s told he will have to give himself four paper cuts in between his fingers. Waymond then starts trying to paper cut himself before saying what we all know, which is that it’s impossible to give yourself a paper cut on purpose. It can only be done on accident. And yet, that is the only way he can access his multiverse doppelgänger’s powers, so he keeps trying until he gets it.
This weird and wacky way in which you access powers becomes a theme throughout the movie, as all the characters must do it. So all characters are constantly doing the weirdest things imaginable. Don’t get me started on the double butt-plug guard fight.
However, as weird as this was, the reason it worked is because the Daniels don’t treat it frivolously. They set the rules up but they play by them religiously. This is the difference between complex good and complex bad, is that with complex good, a lot of actual thought has been placed behind the choices, and then there’s a commitment to that choice for the entire movie. They don’t change the rules mid-stream just because it makes some other part of the plot easier to navigate.
This movie made me feel what it used to be like to go to the movies, where each experience when those lights went down meant you were going to see at least one thing you’ve never seen before. That was the magic of movies, that they could make you see and experience new things. Watch enough of them though, and you realize everybody just copies each other and, therefore, you never see anything new anymore.
Enter the Daniels and you don’t just see one new thing. You see dozens of new things. I mean, there is a love scene in this movie between Evelyn and Jamie Lee Curtis’s IRS character, where they’re in a relationship in another universe, and in this universe, everybody has hot dogs for fingers. Which means everyone has become really good with their feet, as feet have basically replaced hands. And the two are playing piano together, lovingly, with their feet, as their hot dog fingers drape across one another.
Where else are you ever going to see that?
To answer the original question, is this the best movie ever made? No. But it’ll probably be the best movie made in 2022. It is unique. It’s powerful. It’s thoughtful. It’s risky. I was talking with some people outside the theater afterwards and I asked this guy what he’d compare “Everything” to. He said that the first 60 minutes were like an indie version of The Matrix. But he said, after that, the movie is incomparable. You feel like you’re watching something that’s never been done before. I’d agree with that assessment. It’s just so its own thing. And I loved it.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: As tempting to play with as plot and concept are, start from a place of “Who are these characters I’m following? What is it that’s broken within them that needs to be resolved? And what is it that’s broken in their relationships with others that needs to be resolved?” Really think hard about that and how you’re going to explore it in the movie. Because if you start with the plot and the concept and never really explore those three questions about your characters seriously, your script will always feel lifeless to some extent. If you’re not commenting on the human condition in some way… you’re not really writing a movie people will remember.
