I remember when the Academy Award-winning Everything Everywhere All At Once first came out, and it absolutely blew my mind.
What surprised me the most about the film: OTHER people were blown away by it, too. Because, similar to how I’m always surprised that my favorite author, Kurt Vonnegut, is considered a national treasure (Surprised because his writing is so WEIRD), I’m also still shocked at just how much audiences loved EEAAO, because like Vonnegut, the movie is so different from anything else out there.
So, if you’ll allow me, here are a couple of other reasons why I’m still amazed that EEAAO was such a hit.
I Love That Such An Unconventional Immigrant Story Was So Big
There are plenty of conventional immigrant stories. The Godfather (especially its partial prequel, The Godfather, Part II) is a sprawling, albeit simply told, immigrant story. The coolest gangster movie ever made, Scarface, is a simply told immigrant story, too. The Don Bluth classic, An American Tail, is an immigrant story featuring animals, which is unique in a sense, but also conventionally told.
Then, you have Everything Everywhere All At Once, which is probably the most unconventional immigrant story ever made. It’s actually a story of three generations of Asians. Michelle Yeoh plays the matriarch and the middle of the Asian-American immigrant experience. She runs a laundromat and is being audited by the IRS, and soon goes on a multiversal journey to find the best version of herself…sort of. And that’s the thing about this movie: since it’s an absurdist, martial arts comedy, it plays with several different ideas.
Her daughter, played by Stephanie Hsu, doesn’t really care about the Asian-American experience. In fact, she doesn’t really care about anything at all since she’s a nihilist. Her mother, however, feels a bit confined by her heritage, as she feels she has to live up to enormous expectations set by her father, played by the legend, James Hong.
In the end, it’s a story about the Asian-American immigrant experience…and everything else in between. I still blows my mind that so many people of different races vibed with it, given the fact that it’s so weird and also so in tune with the Asian-American experience.
The Movie Is Also Further Proof That Creative Filmmaking Is Still Alive And Well
Another thing that utterly blows my mind about EEAAO is that people totally fell in love with a movie whose pure appeal was its creativity. With sequels and remakes feeling like the norm these days, it makes my heart glad that a movie as creative and bold as EEAAO could be embraced by so many people…for the most part anyway.
I know some people detest this movie; I feel like they detest it for the same reason that people detested my beloved Sinners, and that’s because they think it’s “super overrated.”
I love that it found an audience that is so passionate about the film that they’ll stand by it and say that it deserved the hype. A big reason for this passion is that it’s so rare that a movie can be this creative, and this DIFFERENT, and still be a movie that won tons of awards like Best Picture.
Because in a landscape where so many studios seem not to want to take major risks, EEAAO still seems like an anomaly, as it feels like both a cult movie and a massive blockbuster at the same time, and I still just marvel at that fact. Even all these years later.