Everything Everywhere All at Once hopes that we all find gratitude for the people and the things we have in our lives.
This last week I saw the movie, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. Going into this movie, I didn't know what to expect. I mean, there were the obvious things. There was Michelle Yeoh who (at times) appeared to be wearing a googly eye taped to her forehead. Additionally, there were martial arts. But what movie or television show that has Michelle Yeoh in it does not occasionally veer into the territory of kung fu. With Jackie Chan having gotten old, it seems like a natural fit for Michelle Yeoh to step in and start kicking her way into unique and interesting stories.
The movie by itself was good. I liked the frenetic pacing even if the story itself seemed so chaotic (at times) that I had trouble following what exactly the director was trying to say with this thing. And the acting is exceptional. Each actor at times needs to portray probably five or six different versions of themselves within the same scene. There were also the many surprises I found within the cast, namely Jamie Lee Curtis as a stern and unlovable IRS auditor who has trophies shaped like oversized butt plugs on display in her cubicle, and Ke Huy Quan whom I last remember being a kid in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and The Goonies. Well, he's all grown up and middle-aged even, and here he is still kicking some ass albeit with a fanny pack in the place of nunchaku.
The real surprise though in Everything, Everywhere, All at Once was that its plot on the surface was so simple, yet just a layer deeper it became complex. On the surface, its a story of a woman in an unhappy marriage and lacking an appreciation for anything in her life, just trying to get her taxes done while managing a laundromat. One layer deeper though, and it's a science fiction tale of how this woman experiences all of the lives that she could have lived in differing branching universes and grows to appreciate that there is a huge difference between living the best life, and living a life of authenticity. One of the best lines in the movie comes from Ke Huy Quan who says (more or less) to the woman whom he is married to in other timelines, "I would welcome a lifetime spent with you even if all I did was manage a laundromat."
When I heard that, I instantly got the message of this movie, and I felt it in my soul. So many people forsake the things that are right in front of them always chasing some version of themselves that is supposedly living its greatest life. This kind of living, forever discarding the present (sometimes with contempt) for what might be (if only we'd chosen differently), is a thing that destroys marriages, wrecks friendships, causes some to experience financial ruin, and ultimately leads us down the road to regret. Additionally, I think that a lot of people who are alive in the world today have real problems with gratitude because of this very thing. It may boil down to the fact that modern people lack life experience, especially when young. Indeed, Michelle Yeoh's character (who is the main protagonist), literally needs to incorporate all the life experiences of countless versions of herself in order to see that the life she spends in the laundromat with her husband and her gay daughter is just as valuable as any of the other incarnations of what could have been. And the end of the movie isn't like any other I've seen because it's simply that the main character, still doing her taxes, now has contentment.
After leaving the theater, it left me wondering why I know so many people who are discontented, even if their lives are secure, and they are relatively safe. What is there to want? It was then that I realized that our toxic society beats down on people with the idea that being content and being satisfied with one's life means a lack of ambition. It means you are a loser. And if you don't have any ambition, you might as well just be dead. This assessment may seem harsh, but I don't think it is far from the truth. How refreshing it would be if people were allowed to just live their lives, and there was no family pressure to conform to this or that, or to steer people into busy schedules and overworked lives. If people would stop berating others for lacking ambition, and just allowed people to take the time to really think about their life choices, then I think more people would find the authenticity they seek from their lives and end up happier. It's one thing to know that experience will undoubtedly affect choice, and the more experience you have in a thing, the better off you will probably be when making a choice that has those things to factor into it. It's quite another for me to realize that (without experience itself) people not be able to tell what is good from what is bad. Do we honestly know what sweet is if we haven't tasted sour? And can these things be taught? Or must they be lived? These are all questions that I now have after having watched Everything, Everywhere, All at Once.
This is a great film, and if you're looking for something to go and see in April, I highly recommend it. I've included the trailer below in case you'd like to watch it.
