How Everything Everywhere All At Once captures the zeitgeist

THE Oscars take place this weekend (Mar 12, 8 pm PCT) and here’s predicting that Everything Everywhere All At Once (EEAAO) will nab all the major awards including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor and Actress – with only the Best Actress category set to be a close fight between Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett (for starring in that misguidedly anti-Asian film, Tar). 

Once the winners get on stage, they’re bound to talk about the triumph of Asian representation again, as they have been at every other award ceremony. But EEAAO is so very much more than the sum of its skin tones. It is, by dint of care and attention, one of the most culturally astute films in recent memory, addressing just about every single demand that the younger generation has been making of its entertainment.

When writer-directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert gave the film its broad all-encompassing title, they surely knew all the things that title would come to mean. 

It is a bonkers superhero movie for immigrants and the working class. It is a kick-butt action vehicle led by middle-aged actors. It is a self-empowerment drama for exhausted mothers. It is a marriage saga promoting a different kind of masculinity and domesticity – one in which the husband walks two steps behind the wife and does not resent it. It is an intergenerational family weepie addressing LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) acceptance and, to a smaller degree, physical disability. 

It is a fast-paced, headily-shot, multiverse sci-fi picture so stuffed with meme-baiting pop culture references and jokes (Raccacoonie! Sausage hands! Evil bagel!), it is practically designed for the TikTok generation. It is so attuned to the cultural zeitgeist, it would still be a hit even if the actors were orange and purple instead of yellow and white.   

It is a happy, optimistic, feel-good movie for a world coming out of a terrible pandemic, one of the worst job crises since the Great Depression (particularly for blue-collar workers), #MeToo and the toxic masculinity of the Trump era, as well as a hugely revolutionary decade of discourse on race, gender, class, sexuality, age and ability. With the exception of Women Talking and Triangle Of Sadness, most of the other Oscar nominees in Best Picture category look positively retrograde when compared to EEAAO.

If you haven’t seen the movie, here’s a summary: Yeoh plays a frustrated, overstretched owner of a laundromat which she runs with her sweet-tempered but seemingly naive husband (Ke Huy Quan, the former child star from The Goonies and Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom, now 51 years old). While busy doing her taxes, she must also plan a birthday party for her father (James Hong) visiting from China, and come to terms with her lesbian daughter’s (Stephanie Hsu) relationship with a woman. 

On a visit to an Inland Revenue Service office, her husband briefly changes guise and gives her instructions for how to save the multiverse from the clutches of evil. She begins to have glorious visions of how her life might turn out had she not married him. The baddies show up, the couple combats them, and, from then on, the plot shoots into many directions with multiple versions of themselves leading very different lives.

Yet embedded in this utterly bananas and absurd plot is a deep and compassionate belief that despite all the hurt, disappointment and oppression one might face in life, one must believe that one can overcome them; one must hang on to hope that tomorrow can and will bring a better future.

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In some interviews, writer-director Kwan made the connection between his films and the philosophy of Albert Camus, who distilled life’s purpose into the question: “Does (life’s) absurdity require one to escape it through hope or suicide? This is what must be clarified, hunted down, and elucidated while brushing aside all the rest.”

EEAAO attempts to give us answers and, in doing so, helps us see past all the existential challenges the world has faced in recent times to still hope for brighter days. This singular triumph makes it a deserving winner in any film contest, anywhere, at least for now.

Everything Everywhere All At Once is showing in cinemas.