2022's Best Movie Proves the Goodness of a Fractured World

Something isn't right. Deep down, we know this. The world to which we aspired has turned into one surreal absurdity after another. Everything feels fragmented, disjointed, like we're looking at reflections from a thousand pieces of a broken mirror. We see this in the lives we lead, the stories we tell, and the fears we suffer. Such is the spirit of our time, and such is the source of a collective despair that feels as inescapable as two of the main themes of the Daniels Everything Everywhere All At Once: laundry, and taxes.

EEAAO, I must admit, is one of those rare movies that strikes such a personal chord with me that just one viewing of it resulted in it becoming permanently seared into my psyche, as if it were already there. It's a rare film that so inventively weaves together the universal and the particular, exploring the connection of all our failures, fears, and unfulfilled potentials with the chaos of the wider world. Perhaps it's because of the kind of year that 2022 was to me personally - it held not one, but several key rejections, a stressful cross-country move that meant saying goodbye to my longtime job, all of my loved ones, and the city I'd called home for over a decade, and at the same time, a persistent, sometimes annoying drive to make something good out of all this mess yet. 2022 presented me with the weight of my unmet potential like no other year before, and perhaps for this reason, EEAAO showed me the one fragment of the mirror capable of reflecting myself most clearly. Given this film's success, I know I'm not the only one who's felt that resonance.

When we meet Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh), she sits at a dining table in her cramped, cluttered apartment surrounded by tax forms and receipts, her mind visibly bearing the weight of a thousand universes. It quickly becomes apparent that her downstairs laundromat business is being audited, while her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) and her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) fight in vain to gain her attention and affection. Her elderly father Gong Gong (James Hong) will wake any moment and demand his breakfast, while one downstairs customer (Biff Wiff) demands restitution for a machine that ate his change and another (Jenny Slate) demands her shirts. Joy hopes to have Evelyn accept that her non-Chinese friend Becky (Tallie Medel) is her girlfriend, but between the audit, running a business, cooking breakfast, and preparing for her father's birthday party, all Evelyn can offer is blunt criticism and a cold, glib introduction of Becky to Gong Gong as Joy's "friend." Evelyn is so detached from her life, her family, and from any waking moment that she can't even realize that Waymond wants her attention, not because he's being needy, but because he's trying to serve her divorce papers.

I'm reminded of the opening passage of Louise Glück's magnificent poem Averno: "You die when your spirit dies. / Otherwise, you live. / You may not do a good job of it, but you go on - / something you have no choice about." That is Evelyn. A lifetime of disappointments, rejections, struggles, and failing to live up to her own potential has killed her spirit, and the life she's left with is something she has no choice about. Traditionally we would pair taxes with death as an expression of the only ultimate certainties in life, but here, laundry is itself a type of death. It becomes no secret that she regrets marrying Waymond and immigrating to the United States. She loathes her laundromat. She cannot bear that her daughter is a lesbian. She has grown weary and hardened under the disapproval and harsh criticism of her father, who never approved of Waymond and clearly wanted a son instead of a daughter. With the task of living, she's not doing a good job of it.

As she and Waymond proceed to their audit, conducted by IRS agent Dierdre Beaubeirdra (Jamie Lee Curtis in full goblin mode), all chaos breaks loose. Waymond is taken over by an alternate dimension version of himself, supplying a confused Evelyn with the instructions and technology needed to "verse-jump" when the time comes. He explains that a great evil, Jobu Tupaki, threatens all of existence, and he thinks that she's the version of herself who is capable of stopping it. In another universe, the "Alpha-verse," Evelyn was a scientist who developed multiverse jumping technology, but ended up fracturing her daughter's psyche, resulting in her becoming Jobu, experiencing all universes at the same time with the ability to change matter and reality itself at will. When the time comes for her to verse jump, she follows "Alpha-verse" Waymond's instructions, and finds herself catapulted into an alternate universe where, having never married Waymond, she becomes a famous martial arts movie star.

This second act launches all of the action that follows. Evelyn verse-jumps to several alternate universes: in one, humans have hot dogs for fingers, and she's married to that universe's version of Dierdre. In another, she's a chef at a Habachi grill with a coworker who prepares food by being prompted by a raccoon under his cap, a la Ratatouille. In still another, she's a famous Chinese opera star; in a universe that never developed the conditions to sustain life, she and Joy are rocks who communicate through subtitles. But this universe, where she's an immigrant and owner of a failing laundry business, she's capable of saving everything. As it turns out, in this universe, she's living her worst self. Every failure resulted in a success branching off into another timeline for another Evelyn. She's the trunk from which the success of all other Evelyn's branch. Yet, Alpha-verse Gong Gong, a secondary antagonist who somehow knows better English than this-universe Gong Gong, makes clear the predicament that Evelyn is in. She must kill Joy in order to defeat Jobu and save the metaverse. To engage with Jobu, or to try to save her from herself and her plan to destroy existence with an "everything bagel" containing the singularity of all existence, would result in her mind becoming just as fractured as Jobu's.

The film equates the personal, relational stakes of Evelyn and Joy's mother-daughter relationship with the cosmic stakes of all existence. As Jobu, Joy confides in Evelyn that she did not create this "everything bagel" to destroy existence, but herself. In this film, to destroy the self is to destroy the cosmos. Given these stakes, Evelyn doubts herself - but in one particularly captivating scene, "Alpha" Waymond holds Evelyn's face and explains the beauty of the moment. Yeoh's performance is spot-on here - it's hard not to be moved by her face's recognition of an enormous but healing, seemingly impossible truth. Waymond says,

My dear Evelyn, I know you. With every passing moment, you fear you might have missed your chance to make something of your life. I'm here to tell you, every rejection, every disappointment has let you here, to this moment. Don't let anything distract you from it.

That's a hell of a word, and despite its beauty, it's a difficult one. Imagine not letting yourself be distracted from your failures, rejections, and disappointments. In the midst of not seeing anything bigger than a table full of IRS forms and tax receipts, the pain of being served divorce papers, the sting of being rejected by your family for who you love or because of your gender or any the many losses you endure, imagine bearing it with the mantra "Don't let anything distract you from this." Those moments when you most cry out for an escape or a distraction, imagine those words coming to mind, calling you to be present to yourself, lest your spirit die and you do a bad job of going on living.

It seems miracle that this film would be made in contemporary Hollywood. The Alpha-verse seems a much more likely candidate to be greenlighted for production; in fact, it feels like a Marvel villain origin story. But that's not the universe we're in. We're in the universe of laundry and taxes. Evelyn isn't convinced by some large scale view of the metaverse and her place within it. No, Evelyn's transformation occurs in the moment when she remembers that she is a mother who, above all, loves her daughter. She accepts the danger of a fractured mind because by becoming like Jobu, she can save her Joy. In her movie star "best life" universe, she reconnects with Waymond, who rejects her fleeting romantic advance and explains that despite the fact that she rejected him years ago for his overly kind, seemingly naive disposition, he is no less a fighter than she. In one line, he brings movie star "best self" Evelyn down to Earth: "So, even though you have broken my heart yet again, I wanted to say, in another life, I would have really liked just doing laundry and taxes with you."

EEAAO is a lot of things. It's sci-fi, a family drama, and uproariously funny (cue: a cut-to 2001: A Space Odyssey parody featuring bipedal apes with ludicrous hot dog fingers, or Jobu Tupaki bludgeoning a security guard to death with a massive, two-headed dildo, or a burly, pants-less security guard doing a kung fu jump onto a butt plug). But its beating, bleeding heart is the connective tissue between a single life and its role in the balance of all that is. It's an affirmation of the goodness of things in the midst of the irreparable fragmentation of both world and mind. EEAAO is 2022's best movie because it holds these fragments together and, in their reflections, there we all are, shattered lives and all.