1. Everything Everywhere All at Once, dir. Daniels
The least surprising surprise. I mean, come on! What choice did I have? This was inevitable. I left that theater last March thinking "case closed, that's the best movie of 2022". Everybody I've told about Everything Everywhere All at Once watched this movie and also said "yup, that's obviously the best movie of the year and if you write a Top 15 list it will be boring because the winner is so obvious, Eric". (I promise they did say this.) I'm almost left with little more to say. This movie has everything, as promised. Everything everywhere for two hours and twenty minutes.
Everything Everywhere All at Once is an enormous amount of movie with a lot of tones. Avatar 2 is an hour longer and has far, far less movie in it than this one. Everything Everywhere is an action-packed extravaganza of SciFi reality-bending power, it could be this generation's The Matrix. But beyond that is wonderfully silly, imaginative, and really clever. What seem like one-off gags turn out to be incredibly important. No matter how ridiculous the premise, nothing is thrown away like a Family Guy cutaway gag. Everything Everywhere loves every bizarre part of itself and insists that 100% of its ideas reach a cathartic end in a sometimes exhausting obsession.
However, I believe you can reedit Everything Everywhere All at Once into a much more mundane movie. Because this is a mutliverse epic (sorry Doctor Strange, you got badly out-shown in 2022) it would not even be too difficult to splice out all the fantastic elements and the other realities to just about a forty minute interpersonal drama. At the very core of Everything Everywhere is a family tearing itself apart and then during one very hectic day, finding an ability to communicate again. You could read all the amazing elements as just a symptom of Evelyn (the great Michelle Yeoh)'s boredom or emotional dissatisfaction. Or maybe the multiverse distractions are a metaphor for undiagnosed ADHD, since she cannot focus on her life right now. That is, until her life explodes in a million ways even without scenes of martial arts sodomy.
Personally, waiting on the Everything Everywhere All at Once Topher Grace cut.
Really what Everything Everywhere All at Once is about is a couple of first-generation Chinese immigrants whose life has become completely swamped by debts, failed ambitions, annoying customers, and conservative hang-ups. Just a few minutes in Evelyn's life feels as hectic and anxiety-inducing as Uncut Gems. Her husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan in a glorious return) is a small, quiet man unable to speak up. Their daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) is trying to connect back to the family but her mother refuses to acknowledge her girlfriend, Becky (Tallie Medel). Then there's Gong Gong (the great James Hong), the elderly grandfather who needs to be wheeled around and just happens to be visiting at the most inconvenient time possible.
Still, none of the other universes and martial arts nonsense are unnecessary, Waymond gets his greatest character moment away from what we can consider 'Our Universe'. The dozen or so alternate movies playing in this have their own importance and care given to them. But Everything Everywhere is never about anything other than this battle to accept each other. To let down whatever terrible voice in our head pushes our loved ones away and instead forces into a role we hate, such as a mother who can only nag her daughter about her weight.
I did consider doing a double Number One, with Everything Everywhere All at Once and Turning Red both sharing the top spot. It is incredible that we have two movies with so many similar themes, both in the Top 3, both about Chinese mothers and daughters, both about accepting queerness (either subtextually or textually) and weirdness and freedom, and both released in March 2022. This generational split in that community has clearly been a source of a lot of pain, even as it is such a muse. It meant a lot to half of the directing duo, who poured his own emotions into this project. It means a lot to me, because my near-boomer parents can be ignorant idiots sometimes, and I'm not Chinese and never will be. I love how this real trauma can be felt cinematically in fantastical metaphors. Maybe you're a mom turned into a kaiju red panda destroying Toronto, maybe you're a daughter whose trauma has transformed you into a super cool Final Fantasy villain and now will annihilate reality with a nihilism bagel.
I had a sense many years ago that the directing duo known as Daniels (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) were bound for greatness years ago when I saw their short film, Interesting Ball. That feels now like something of a dress rehearsal for what they would achieve in Everything Everywhere All at Once. There is this wonderful affect in that twelve-minute short, where we see many different surreal stories all happening... at once, and while none are alike, they all come together in this beautiful collage. The ball bounces around, creating impossible and disgusting yet wonderful things, and has an almost cosmic effect of shaking the universe down. Interesting Ball is revolution of all standards, embracing the way grossness can tie us all together in childlike delight. Where we are free to be anything, be that a young woman on a date with an older man, or sucked up an asshole to be one with our best friend soulmate.
Besides all that, Interesting Ball is a very impressive work of editing. Everything Everywhere All at Once is repeating that feat, since by the third act of this movie, its various plotlines have splintered into what should be an incoherent mass. Evelyn has in just one day, seen her life transform from merely being an overwhelmed laundromat owner to now the hero of all reality. And while fighting for the entire multiverse, she's begun to connect with her various other selves across time and space. This includes a famous movie star in a smoke-filled alley straight out of Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love, or a hibachi chef trying to reconnect her co-worker with Raccacoonie (played by Randy Newman!), a raccoon that lives on his head.
It takes real skill to sketch together a film that can connect low-stakes personal drama, Silver Age SciFi nonsense, one of the most acclaimed movies of the 20th century, a misremembered plot to a Disney movie, and Hot Dog Fingers without the production collapsing. Instead, all the stories progress at once to a beautiful pay-off. Maybe the most powerful scene in cinema in 2022 was in Everything Everywhere, with two rocks with googly eyes talking to each other with subtitles. It is such a joke of a premise, yet it is emotional cornerstone of this entire movie. Little dumbass rocks will made me cry.
So yeah, Everything Everywhere All at Once is the most obvious Movie of the Year pick I've had in all the years I've done this. It achieves everything you could want out of cinema without compromise, without dumbing it down, fearlessly. I do not envy Daniels for ever having to follow up a work like this. Because if made Everything Everywhere, I would just retire. What more do you need to say after this? Everything Everywhere is already in your one masterpiece movie.
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