To the Max 

click to enlarge

• A24 Films

There are a lot of good reasons for someone who writes about movies not to read other people's thoughts before they've written their own. Maybe it's to avoid being swayed one way or another by outside responses; maybe it's to make sure you never plagiarize, even accidentally. But there's also the practical-slash-emotional matter of stumbling across a description of a movie so perfect that you know you can't possibly top it—like when I saw a Letterboxd review of Everything Everywhere All At Once refer to the aesthetic of the film's writer/directors, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, as "earnest maximalism."

Seriously, where do I go from there? Because if there is anything that's clear from "Daniels'" two features—this one preceded by 2016's Swiss Army Man, infamously featuring Daniel Radcliffe as a flatulent corpse—it's that they are willing to go to absolutely any lengths for a payoff more emotional than you might expect from their high-concept premises. So if I tell you that Everything Everywhere All At Once is a multiverse-spanning action movie with a butt-stuff sense of humor that also kind of made me want to break down in tears, is that not just a longer-winded way of saying "earnest maximalism"?

It begins with a particularly chaotic day in the life of Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh). She's preparing for an IRS audit of the laundromat business she runs with her husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), and organizing a Chinese New Year party for that same night, all while trying to avoid revealing to her own father (James Hong) that her daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), is gay, and facing the revelation from Waymond that he's unhappy in their marriage. But all of that takes a back seat when Waymond abruptly informs him that his body is being visited by a version of himself from an alternate timeline, and that Evelyn herself might be the key to saving all universes from an existential threat.

The "chosen one" hero narrative—complete with a process for our hero to discover a facility for bad-ass kung fu, and accomplices in another reality tapping into bodies remotely—certainly evokes The Matrix, but that's only a taste of Daniels' mad mix-tape of movie references. They nod and wink to everything from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to Ratatouille, and from Stanley Kubrick to Wong Kar-wai, almost always in service of a joke that pays off in a more substantial way than "hey, did you notice the movie we were just referring to?"

Beyond their cinephilia, Kwan and Scheinert serve up a parade of non-stop motion and gags. The conceit by which Evelyn and others acquire new skills from alternate-universe versions of themselves—doing something incredibly improbable—lends itself an almost infinite range of absurdities for the filmmakers to visualize. The alternate universes themselves may differ by virtue of the haute-couture costumes worn by the characters, or they may render the characters as versions of themselves which aren't necessarily human, or maybe human but in a really weird way. Oh yeah, and then there's the unique extended metaphor for the doomsday device that threatens the multiverse. Like the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team at their Airplane! peak, the Daniels can't possibly land every punch line, but fire them at you so fast that you can barely remember the duds.

If that were all Everything Everywhere All At Once had going for it, it would still be loads of fun. But it isn't, and it feels like these filmmakers are constitutionally incapable of presenting something that's only superficially entertaining. At its heart, this becomes a quest to discover what really tears universes apart, and what it's possible to accomplish through love, kindness and tolerance. And maybe it's telling us what we need to hear about accepting the one and only world—and version of people—that we have in front of us, instead of lamenting what we wish were different.

That closing burst of sincerity flips the movie on its head, and undoubtedly it's going to be somewhere between a little too much and a lot too much for some viewers over more than 130 minutes. For those who do dance to this particular beat—a delivery system for every possible emotional and genre note—it's enough to make you want to create an entirely new vocabulary to describe it. Or have someone else create that vocabulary for you.