Everything Everywhere All at Once

Michelle Yeoh sporting a googly third eye in Everything Everywhere All at Once

Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert's Everything Everywhere All at Once ranks as the surprise hit of 2022. It has played continuously in theaters in Portland since its March opening. I was entertained by the film and, since it verges on two and a half hours long, that is no mean feat. The film is full of the goofy humor that punctuated the Daniels' previous film, Swiss Army Man, with, fortunately, fewer fart jokes. The cast is uniformly good with particularly memorable efforts by Michelle Yeoh, Jenny Slate, and a virtually unrecognizable Jamie Lee Curtis. The frugly costumes are especially memorable.  

However, I think the film fails to create the believable and moving portrait of family dynamics it attempts, much less a believable and explicable multiverse. Most critics have compared this film favorably to Doctor Strange 2. Certainly there is a lot of common ground between the two films: the multiverse, cartoon violence, third eyes, youthful lesbians, etc. Nevertheless, the sense of loss and bereavement that lurks beneath the surface in Doctor Strange 2 was more palpable to me than the familial discord of Everything Everywhere All at Once. This defect is not fatal to the light entertainment that is Everything Everywhere All at Once's goal, but it suggests that the film's charms lie on its surface and not in its non-existent depths.