Everything Is Just Enough

Everything Everywhere All at Once
Cinestudio
Trinity College
Hartford
Jan. 14, 2025

I never got the chance to see Everything Everywhere All at Once, the 2022 winner of the Oscar for Best Picture. It also won awards for several of the actors, so its reputation has only grown since then.

Thankfully, the movie came back to Cinestudio for a midday showing that I showed up for.

The plot of the movie revolves around Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh), a Chinese immigrant who is estranged from her teenage daughter and discontent with her life in general. She’s suddenly whisked away into an adventure spanning the multiverse, where she must absorb the knowledge and skills of different versions of herself to confront an evil that threatens to destroy all realities. 

I don’t want to go more into the plot than that, even for a two-year-old movie, because there are enough twists and turns in the film that it’s still best to go into it without knowing too much. 

But we’ve had a lot of multiverse stuff lately. The concept of multiple universes is hardly new; we’ve been dealing with it since Spock appeared with a beard in the old Star Trek episode ​“Mirror Mirror”. Since then it has become a staple of sci-fi storytelling, giving us some of the best (and worst) television series and movies in the meantime. 

It’s become a bit tiresome as a concept though, especially because in the hands of the comic book movie-industrial complex, the multiverse is a cheat to constantly shower fans with cameos and dream scenarios that otherwise break even the tenuous logic of those films. 

Where Everything differs is that it uses the possibility of other universes to explore the possibilities missing in ourselves, not as wish fulfillment. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of hilarious moments in Everything (again, I won’t spoil them), but they serve as a kind of bait and switch. The goofiness gets the attention, but there’s a real heart at the center of the movie that sneaks past you while the humor disarms you.

The relationship between Evelyn Wang and her daughter, Joy (played by Stephanie Hsu) is a story that any parent and child can recognize, and as you get older you can see it from both perspectives. Stephanie doesn’t feel appreciated by her mother, and Evelyn feels that her daughter has no respect for her or the right way to do things.

The tension between mother and daughter sets up the primary conflict of the movie, but also simultaneously offers the best solution. Yeoh’s jumping across the multiverse may result in some hilarious and exciting action scenes, but what she’s fighting for in the end is to understand her own daughter. The chemistry between Yeoh and Hsu is critical to the success of the movie, because they demonstrate how love takes a different shape under different circumstances. Outstanding supporting cast work from Ke Huy Quan and Jamie Lee Curtis elevates the film even further, and it’s no wonder that both, along with Yeoh, won Academy Awards for their performances.

There’s so much more to say about this movie, and I’m typically a person who believes that stories have a relatively short statute of limitations when it comes to spoilers. But the surprise of this movie, in so many different scenes and presented in so many different ways, deserves to be preserved for those who haven’t seen it yet. And you need to see it, whether on the big screen in a re-release or in the comfort of your home on streaming. 

NEXT

Jamil heads out in the cold for some hot music.