Screen Notes: Everything Everywhere All At Once; Dual

Michelle Yeoh in  Everything Everywhere All At Once

I went into the multi-genre, multi-verse sci-fi/action/comedy Everything Everywhere All At Once enthusiastically, mostly because of Michelle Yeoh (Evelyn Wang) in the central role and a desire to see her reclaim some of the glory of her earlier work, which contains a few arguably key moments in the evolution and popularity of martial arts films, from her Supercop movies with Jackie Chan to Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. In general, A24's recent output has given good reason to anticipate Yeoh's return, especially since appearances in lackluster fair such as Gunpowder Milkshake and Shang Chi weren't exactly putting her front and center. Everything Everywhere also features a unique attraction in the performance of Ke Huy Quan (Waymond Wang), an actor probably most remembered for his role playing sidekick to Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom circa 1984. Quan has not been entirely gone from acting between then and now, but Everything Everywhere certainly marks what has been heralded as an acting comeback, and he and Yeoh are great together in the film, even jumping universes at one point to lovingly inhabit an homage to Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung in Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love. Overall, I was hoping for an A24 film that understands why Andrea Arnold, Kelly Reichardt, Yogos Lanthimos, Sean Baker, Ari Aster, Janicza Bravo, Rose Glass, and the Safdies--to name only a few--are filmmakers worthy of free reign to follow their vision. But, instead, with Everything Everywhere, we get another entry from the makers of the kind of awful Swiss Army Man, the guys who (annoyingly) call themselves "Daniels." 

Everything Everywhere All At Once is a movie whose defense against it's excesses is conveniently baked into the title, as well as every last overdone aspect of the narrative, including the overused sci-fi cliché of the "portal" that needs to either be embraced or defeated: a cosmic "everything" bagel, in this case. The overseer of the bagel is the film's "big bad" Jobu Tupaki, played by the wonderful Stephanie Hsu, who also plays the daughter of Evelyn and Waymond, Joy Wang, but certainly gets to wear more interesting outfits in the Jobu role. All throughout Everything Everywhere you'll find moments of inventive spectacle, whether it be Jobu's get-ups, some of the better articulated martial arts scenes, or any aspect that displays Daniels' penchant for in-camera cleverness over CGI, but the parts are definitely, ultimately, greater than the whole. 

The Daniels met as animation students who realized they weren't very good at animation, but wanted, rather, to attempt animation ideas in a live-action format. This goal seems intriguing at a glance, and is also what appears superficially interesting about their only other feature-length collaboration, Swiss Army Man--a film much smaller in scope, cast, budget, and ambition, while still attempting the feel of a live-action cartoon. As with that film, Everything Everywhere wants to have all of it's anal gags and emotions, too. The key factor in this attempt at having "everything" is rooting the audience in the reality of the Wang's, who live in "our universe," I guess--the one where your work and debt are suffocating, prejudice exists, and you don't know martial arts. I would unpack the narrative that propels the characters across splintering timelines, but I fear it would be as exhausting to explain this iteration of the "multi-verse" as it is to experience it unfold, especially since we seem to be nearing peak multi-verse exhaustion via the recent Marvel Universe iterations and a multitude of animation and TV ranging from Rick and Morty to Undone, and the consensus is that the "multi-verse" is whatever you need it to be to exercise your poetic inclinations--a broken bowl, a cracked watch, a box of chocolates, and so on. 

What might be more important than the narrative mechanics of the multiverse in Everything Everywhere is to point out how the Daniels, ultimately, use it as just another vehicle for escapism, which seems to be paying off with audiences, but is also nothing special. The film's narrative through-line about a young, queer Chinese daughter of immigrants coming out to her family and coming to terms with her mother is commendable to the extent that it's able to carry an emotional impact, but it's also simultaneously unsurprising and difficult to care about by the film's end because of the 4 or 5 multi-verse gags that make the film increasingly annoying across 4 or 5 repetitions too many. And, generally, I'm all-in for a film that pulls off excess and fragmentation and repetition. Repetition, particularly, can be potent, elegant, and emotionally resonant, but here it lacks a tricky and required balance. This is too bad, because I kind of enjoyed the universe showing the movie with a well-played drama featuring Yeoh and Hsu, and that might have been enough for me. Unfortunately, I found the last 30 to 45 minutes of this film almost impossible to connect with, even though the occasional novel idea emerged, as with the martial arts battle that lands curing blows to Evelyn's opponents. Of course, something is bound to work when you throw everything at the wall, and this film is nothing if not a cinematic expression of that creative tactic. The Daniels are a bit high on their own supply, so to speak, and in need of an editor. And yet, minus the butt-plug battle, the overdone Raccoon bit, the inexplicably unexpurgated hot dog fingers universe, and the embarrassingly unfunny performance by Jamie-Lee Curtis, I'm still not sure Everything Everywhere would have enough sincerity at it's core to hold it all together.

Karen Gillan and Aaron Paul in  Dual

I'm curious to catch up with the previous films of Riley Stearns after seeing his new film Dual, an absurdist, stark comedy that is just darkly funny enough to root the somewhat risky sci-fi premise of a terminally ill young woman, Sarah (Karen Gillan), battling her clone for supremacy over her own identity. I'm particularly curious to see if Stearns previous films (Faults, The Art of Self Defense) display the same unique aspect of world building that Dual manages so well. As with the films of Yorgos Lanthimos (Dogtooth, The Lobster), Riley places us in a world that trusts our ability as viewers to gather clues and play with the ambiguities. At first glance, Dual seems to have a firm grasp on precisely what it wants to show and what it wants to leave mysterious in a way I suspect will compel viewers back to it. It's the kind of film you want to revisit almost as a way of continuing the conversation it started,  rather than simply parse out the easter eggs and references (see above). 

Gillan makes some strong acting choices that seem both rooted in the absurdist future of the film, and the absurdist present. It's this overall balance that makes Dual work so well, but is also precarious enough to feel, at times, nearly thrown out of whack. Mid-film, once Sarah has sought out a combat coach--played with laid back aplomb by Aaron Paul--to help her conquer her double in a seemingly sanctioned "duel" (an intended doubling of the film's title), there is a curious scene where Paul's trainer character seems to proposition Sarah for payment through sexual favors, which quick-cuts to the punchline of Gillan giving him a free hip-hop dance lesson. It's the kind of moment that, in the theatre, felt quirky to me in the worst way, a hallmark of some of the more regrettable films to escape from Sundance. But, afterwards, I was struck by how that goofy scene resonated, because the world of Dual is reliant on the premise that cloning is not going to take place in some estranged future where, all of a sudden, hip-hop dance lessons don't co-exist with cloning practices, as well as the awkward negotiations and family gatherings and group therapies that might come with it. It's this aspect of Dual that seems most successful to me, how it's more interested in Absurdism than just being another piece of low key science fiction. Likely, this is what will frustrate some audiences about the film, especially those who need to focus on the particular mechanics of a science fiction premise, and, perhaps, fail to see the humor of how Sarah's clone is created in an edit between her spitting into a cup and meeting her clone for the first time. 

Also, the film shares more DNA with David Cronenberg than typical Sundance fare, especially in the way the duel scenes evoke the bleacher viewings of the car crash re-enactments in Crash, but also in the framing and tone of the design, the quality of the violence and viscera. Dual is certainly more overtly comedic than Cronenberg, which is not to say that Cronenberg isn't funny, but, rather, operating on a similarly unique comedic wavelength. Naked Lunch, for instance, is hysterical, but maybe not the first thing people remember about it. Likewise, a noteworthy scene late in Dual that I found brilliantly funny depicts a group therapy session that Sarah and her double visit to work through their issues with one another, including the increasing sense that Sarah's boyfriend Peter (Beulah Koale) and her mother (Maija Paunio) have taken more of a liking to new Sarah. In the group therapy scene we meet mostly doubles who have lost their originals, and in the scene they write letters to their originals--instructed by their group leader to do so with their non-dominant hands for a sense of otherness--and the short stories that emerge almost make you want to follow the briefly glimpsed paths of each group member. In one letter, a double creepily laments the loss of his original's "touch," while another depressed and suicidal double asks his original, who committed suicide, how he could have left him in such a depressing place with such awful people, while contemplating his own suicide attempt to come. And, these are the jokes, folks. Dark, for certain, but a very sly, understated comedic sensibility, both in the script and the performances, are what carries it through to the final frames: an almost purely visual joke as tragic as it is hilarious. Dual allows us to find the humor in the absurd, fully committed to the idea that our scientific and technological advances can never magically erase the ridiculous in the human.