Peter Howell: How ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ went from tiny festival film to Oscars favourite

Challengers for Best Picture at the Oscars have often launched at the prestigious Toronto, Cannes, Venice and Telluride film festivals. There’s never before been one from the blue-collar SXSW Film and TV Festival in Austin, Texas.

Until now: “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” the multiverse freakout by 35-year-old writers/directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (known collectively as Daniels), is poised to storm Sunday’s 95th Academy Awards. It has a leading 11 nominations, Best Picture among them, after an implausible year that began last March 11 at South by Southwest, where it opened the fest.

Made for less than $25 million (U.S.), “EEAAO” has to date grossed more than $107 million internationally (it’s still in theatrical and streaming release), making it the most successful movie ever for independent studio A24, the hippest of boutique film labels.

This almost indescribable comic sci-fi adventure of Asian-American laundromat owners who “verse-jump” between multiple dimensions to fight bizarre existential threats, including mind-controlling raccoons and a soul-sucking giant bagel, has also shaken up notions of what constitutes a Best Picture winner.

Members of the tradition-bound and mostly boomer-aged Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences seem poised to shower gold upon a film many of them admit they don’t understand — and they’re not alone. Kwan told Vulture his own mom, a Chinese immigrant herself, seems baffled by his film’s success: “She was like, ‘I know people like the film, but can you explain why people love it?’”

Whether “Everything Everywhere” wins or loses on Sunday night — and it’s bound to win something — the Oscars will never be the same again.

The movie is already boosting the visibility and career prospects of Asian actors in Hollywood. Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan and Stephanie Hsu, three of the film’s four Oscar-nominated actors (Jamie Lee Curtis is the fourth) have all spoken of feeling overlooked and undervalued by the industry before this breakthrough. It’s particularly sweet for Quan, the likely Best Supporting Actor winner, a former child actor (“Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” and “The Goonies”) who hasn’t been in a movie for 20 years.

Few people could have predicted this a year ago when Malaysian-born actor Yeoh, 60, best known for her martial arts skills in the action film “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and the 007 adventure “Tomorrow Never Dies,” urged the SXSW premiere audience to “put on your safety belts and get ready for the ride of your life!”

When the lights came back up two and a half hours later inside Austin’s Paramount Theatre, the capacity crowd roared with approval and an eagerness to ask questions about what they’d just witnessed. (YouTube has the Q&A session.)

“We used to do a lot of music videos and we would get rejected a lot,” said Scheinert, who together with creative partner Kwan has explored weird tales and absurd characters for more than a decade.

“And we had all these leftover ideas, so we were like, ‘Let’s make a movie with everything in it, so we can use up all those things that Rihanna said no to.’” (Coincidentally, Rihanna will also be at the Oscars, singing the nominated song “Lift Me Up” from “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.”)

Added a delighted Yeoh: “That script blew all of us away. I still don’t understand it.”

“Everything Everywhere” is even weirder than “Swiss Army Man,” the 2016 feature debut by Daniels — and that’s a bromantic love story starring Daniel Radcliffe as a flatulent corpse.

You could call “EEAAO” an ecstatic enigma, one embraced not only by critics and audiences but also by a host of pre-Oscars awards (among them the guilds for directors, producers and actors) that indicate a likely awards bounty on Sunday night. Even rival director Steven Spielberg, whose family drama “The Fabelmans” has seven nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director, has praised the “amazing genius work” of Daniels, prompting Kwan to tweet “thank you, dearest papa.”

The slow rise to prominence of “Everything Everywhere” has been a marvel to witness in a topsy-turvy Oscars campaign that has seen more traditional Best Picture contenders — among them “The Fabelmans,” “The Banshees of Inisherin,” “All Quiet on the Western Front” and “Top Gun: Maverick” — lose considerable heat for one reason or another.

Despite the film’s enthusiastic reception in Austin — where the civic motto is “Keep Austin Weird” — “EEAAO” seemed anything but a future Oscar front-runner when it opened commercially in 10 U.S. theatres last March 25 (Canada followed a week later). The opening weekend box office take was just $501,305 (U.S.), enough for an 13th-place ranking but outside the much publicized Top 10 box office list.

“Everything” proved to be the Little Weird Movie That Could, rising into the Top 10 through critical praise and word-of-mouth, and staying there until the middle of the summer. It even hit the No. 1 spot, for a single day, on May 4. (“EEAAO” did well in Canada, too, although it ranks 23rd for 2022 box-office success in this country.)

A big of part of the reason for the film’s unlikely success is the adorability and indefatigability of the directors, cast and crew. The “Everything Everywhere” teammates obviously all love each other, as displayed in their ecstatic group hugs at such events as the recent Screen Actors Guild and Independent Spirit awards, where the film dominated both shows.

Unlike many of their awards seasons rivals, who often seem bored or resentful about having to promote their films, the “EEAAO” team appears increasingly energized as Oscar night approaches. Just this week, Kwan and Scheinert did a riff on their gonzo goofballs reputation to help open “Late Night With Stephen Colbert,” a promo aimed squarely at the final days of Oscar voting.

These guys are as fun as verse-jumping foxes.

So how good is the movie? A mini review

Everything Everywhere All at Once

Starring Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan, Stephanie Hsu, Jamie Lee Curtis, James Hong, Jenny Slate and Harry Shum Jr. Written and directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. Screening on multiple online platforms. 149 minutes. PG

“No need to explain!” a character helpfully exclaims in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” much like the enigmatic rabbit in “Alice in Wonderland.”

That Lewis Carroll classic comes to mind, and so do more contemporary mind-benders like “The Matrix” and “Looper,” along with innumerable Hong Kong action films, in this exuberant second feature by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (“Swiss Army Man”).

“Verse-jumping” through a multitude of multiverses, it follows struggling Asian-American laundromat owner Evelyn Wang, played by Michelle Yeoh, as she struggles to keep her family together while also seeking to save a panoply of parallel realms — including worlds of talking rocks, mind-controlling raccoons, hot dog fingers and sinister giant bagels — from dissolving into nothingness.

The main story is actually quite linear and empathically acted: Evelyn seeks to reconnect with her divorce-seeking husband (Ke Huy Quan), her estranged gay daughter (Stephanie Hsu) and her demanding traditional dad (James Hong) while placating an officious tax collector (Jamie Lee Curtis). Then everything everywhere gets thrown down rabbit holes of multiverse insanity, which sometimes gets exhausting but never boring.

Raising an ecstatic hot dog middle finger to the negativity of modern times, “EEAAO” urges us to free our minds and accept that it’s OK to be strange. To quote one of the film’s talking rocks: “Every new discovery is just a reminder we’re all small and stupid.”

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