everything everywhere all at once promised, by its very title, to be all of these. not to mention that it was recommended to me but literally everyone. they know i go in for this stuff. i love all the crazy films charlie kaufman wrote being john malkovich, adaptation, eternal sunshine of the spotless mind.
i also love films where there’s a “we’re all connected” or it’s “not as it seems” aspect. for some reason 2004 was a big year for those:
what the bleep do we know?! —a very independent documentary with a fictional subplot starring marlee matlin and 14 scientists and mystics exploring the worlds of quantum physics, neurology, and molecular biology in relation to the spheres of spirituality. and the higher budget much better as a film i heart huckabees directed by david o. russell with jude law, mark wahlberg, jason schwartzman, isabelle huppert, lily tomlin and dustin hoffman. it revolves around disaffected employees at a major international corporation beginning to suspect that there’s more to life than what appears, and hoffman and tomlin as existential detectives who help unravel the mystery. the f-word is also featured prominently.
for the first 30 minutes of the movie, everyone would have been right. from the moment that i saw waymond wang (ke huy quan) up on the security screens behind his wife evelyn (michelle yeoh) behaving not at all as he did when he was with her, i was riveted. this was my movie. i got really quiet because there was so much to take in and pay attention to (which, as my family can attest, is not my practice when home streaming).
that first visit to the irs was deliriously delicious. quan, one of most engaging new faces and voices on the screen, delighted me with his every moment. yeoh seemed marvelously flummoxed by it all. eighties heartthrob who is still gorgeous in real life (a fish called wanda) jamie lee curtis made a spectacular villain as the frumpy irs auditor miss dierdre.
the central conceit of the film (spoiler alert? it’s revealed early on and probably in all other reviews) that there are an infinite number of parallel universes in which evelyn and waymond, their daughter joy and even miss dierdre exist and have made different choices therefore are leading different lives. most of us don’t know this and don’t know how to hop from life to life, but another waymond wang from another life has come to find this evelyn wang to save the multiverse (who hates her life of poorly owning and operating a laundromat and has a poor relationship with her daughter).
i love this premise because for years i have gone around saying that mathematicians prove that there are parallel universes. and it just feels true to me–which stephen colbert–the rightwing talk show host, not the late night host–coined as “truthiness.” while even the quickest internet search reveals that mathematicians have not proved the existence of parallel universes, they also have not disproved it. from what i studied of quantum physics in my masters program (several courses from quantum physicist, amit goswami), i gleaned that there is clear proof that at the level of the quantum field, the exact same quantum particle can exist simultaneously in multiple places at once doing different things. it is also true that everything in the physical world, no matter how solid it appears, has only a probability not a certainty of continuing to appear that way. it only appears that way because consciousness agrees that is that. the larger it is, the higher the probability that it will continue to appear that way. like mt. shasta has a 99.999% chance of appearing to be mt. shasta. however, were a huge number of people to agree that it was no longer a mountain, it would no longer be a mountain–like instantly and not involving dynamite.
all of that makes me think that at any given time i can choose between many versions of myself. i think there is a version of myself that kept eating entire containers of ice cream alone in a room. there is a version of me that is still leading a church. there is a version of me that never left public policy. maybe even a version that succeeded in helping create medicare for all in the us or california. all these saras exist simultaneously as possibilities even if not realities.
and then…there came to be more and more fighting. versions of evelyn and waymond fighting in different costumes with various degrees of skill and strength–the most entertaining of which was a universe in which everyone had long floppy fingers.
the minutes ticked by and i began to realize that the beginning of the movie had a screen that said:
part i – everything
and then over an hour into the movie there was another screen that said:
part ii – everywhere
and then another hour crawled along with much fighting and it dawned on me that only one thing could be in our future:
fortunately this part turned out to be a denouement (and not a very exciting one). it is completely unclear why the villain in the piece (not miss dierdre but i won’t tell you who) wants to do what she does or how that could possibly destroy the world. none of it comes together.