Stick to doing taxes and laundry
I love January. There’s nothing better than smugly scoffing at successful and important film critics’ end-of-year lists. It fuels my sense of superiority to see the New York Times and Indiewire fawn over decidedly mid movies, and I’m sure my keyboard warring in these publications’ comments lets those journalists know that I’m the real cinema tastemaker. It’s also a great cope—Metacritic’s official reviewers might have respect, credibility, and employment, but I’m the one with taste.
That said, I really don’t see myself as a contrarian. I really dug a lot of the “certified fresh” movies on Rotten Tomatoes that were released last year. There are just a few movies that I think are massively overrated, and since I have my little soapbox to stand on, allow me to go off.
Everything Everywhere All At Once (EEAAO) (2022), directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. The rare popularly and critically acclaimed big-screen experience. It’s at the top of a lot of year-end lists.
I didn’t like it. Allow me to explain.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a modern sci-fi classic. It also inspired a glut of art-school string theorists. The latest offering in this trend is EEAAO—a visually-overstimulating and philosophically-vapid attempt at an existential statement. I had hoped this brand of quirky nihilist humanism would die when Rick and Morty was cancelled. This film is like watching Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos on molly.
While the acting is uniformly excellent, and the action sequences are well directed, the weak screenwriting belies the Daniels’ apparent confidence in their art. The “grand statement” that subjective experience and emotion give meaning to an objectively meaningless existence is questionable, as this philosophy has no greater purchase than the conventional worldviews that the Daniels spend two and a half hours gleefully undermining.
What I found most irritating about EEAAO was that it could’ve been an excellent family drama that engages maturely with the philosophical questions that the Daniels seem so keenly aware of. Once freed from the suffocating and juvenile randomness of the film’s first two acts, Evelyn and Joy Wang’s (mother-daughter characters) discussions of family, faith, and tradition achieve some emotional resonance. Waymond’s (the father character) pithy and humble ruminations on the simplicity of doing taxes and laundry with Evelyn were especially stirring and brought to mind Wong Kar-Wai’s best writing.
This would’ve been a much better movie if Waymond and Evelyn were just doing taxes and laundry. While I was no fan of The Humans, I think that the Daniels should have followed Stephen Karam’s formula and merely embellished their characters’ development with armchair philosophy. The Daniels’ portrayal of the Wang family’s dysfunction was coherent in a way that their statement on “Life, the Universe, and Everything” certainly isn’t.
I guess the Daniels were too busy beating existential morality to death with a [censored] to care about whether their spectacle amounted to anything. This is not to say that philosophical filmmaking demands the solemnity of Tarkovsky, but EEAAO fatally mistakes immaturity for irreverence. The Daniels present themselves as philosophical iconoclasts, but have nothing more to say than the guy in an undergrad metaphysics class who won’t shut up.
