Oscars 2023 Best Picture: Why Everything Everywhere All at Once should win

I hadn’t seen any film by the Daniels before I set my eyes upon Everything Everywhere All at Once. I resisted the urge to watch it because I am always suspicious of the initial hoopla that surrounds certain movies before they almost inevitably escape popular imagination. But with Everything Everywhere All at Once (EEAAO from now on), the hoopla only increased in volume until everybody was talking about this indie movie that was not indie anymore — in terms of box office numbers, that is. The film stars Michelle Yeoh as a harried Chinese immigrant woman called Evelyn Quran Wang whose overwrought life women in India and I imagine many other places in the world would empathise with. She lives with a fractious teenage daughter Joy Wang (Stephanie Hsu), and a meek husband Waymond Wang (Ke Huy Quan).

Eleven Oscar nominations!

Everything Everywhere All at Once has 11 nominations, including the major categories like Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, and Best Supporting Actor. The film will likely not do a Return of the King — the conclusion to Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy that clinched 11 trophies out of 11 nominations at the 76th Academy Awards. But if it wins in either of the three major categories, and it might likely win in two, it will end up with at least four or five trophies — not bad for a supposedly indie movie.

What made Everything Everywhere All at Once so special?

Yeoh’s casting inEEAAO was both inspired and ridiculous, I thought. Inspired because, well, she has been a fantastic performer for decades now. And absurd because despite her drab clothing, she nevertheless managed to look luminous and did not really fit in with this working-class-unfashionable-woman part. It did, however, fit with the film’s increasingly absurdist tone.

Evelyn runs a laundrette and is in trouble with the IRS. Her daughter wants her to accept her girlfriend who Evelyn refuses to see as anything but her friend. Her husband is trying to serve divorce papers to her, a preemptive attack before she can do that. And her formidable father (James Hong), against whose wishes she eloped with Waymond and came to America, is coming to visit her for the Lunar Year Party. Oh, and she has to regularly visit the IRS office and face the dead-eyed gaze of inspector Deirdre Beaubeirdre (a brilliantly bureaucratic Jamie Lee Curtis).

In short, Evelyn’s life, it would seem, could not get any crazier. But it does. She is told by an alt-universe version of her husband, who possesses her universe’s Waymond using advanced technology from his universe, and tells her that her universe is just one among an infinite number of parallel universes, and that every life choice, no matter how small, creates a new reality, diverting the course of events significantly.

The multiverse, says alt-Waymond, is in peril because of an evil entity called Jobu Tupaki, and Evelyn is the last hope of all living beings on earth. For Tupaki experiences every reality all at once, can manipulate matter, and has plans to erase every reality from existence.

At this point, you would think the film will turn into a race against time to save the multiverse from the supervillain. It is what most movies of this kind do, after all. But no. EEAAO is a lot smarter than that. It riffs on everything from The Matrix to Ratatouille to Hong Kong martial arts movies, and remains endlessly fresh and inventive. It embraces the gloriously bonkers side of the multiverse, exploring horizons most films delving into similar ideas can barely touch. The two hour and twenty minutes of screen time, which would usually be intimidating, zips past.

Michelle Yeoh gives a superb performance

Yeoh is in almost every frame of the movie, and a good thing too. For she is indescribably good — portraying the pain, confusion, exhaustion, and other moods with a veteran's ease. Stephanie Hsu, who plays her daughter Joy, also impresses, sporting different, gonzo outfits in nearly every other scene to exhibit her queerness. Ke Huy Quan is endearing as a timid but kind husband, who, lacking the hand-to-hand combat skills of his alt-universe counterpart, relies on his determination and genial, inoffensive personality to disarm people and get things done. This isthe mother of all comebacks.

The themes, admittedly, are somewhat simplistic: generational divide, family values, acceptance, and nihilism. Nothing you have not seen before. But you would be an odd person if you actually pause to examine the thematic depth of this wonderful film. To paraphrase Stephen Fry's words about PG Wodehouse's novels, you do not analyse such sunlit perfection, you just bask in its splendour.

Everything Everywhere All At Once is an absolute blast and should take the Best Picture Oscar.

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