‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’

“Second Take” is an occasional feature that offers another look at current movies.

As a proud native Kansan, it has occasionally mystified me why Dorothy would ever wish to return to her own little world. Oz still seems more entertaining than Auntie Em’s farm.

A few years back after hearing then-Sunflower State governor Kathleen Sebelius give a less than stirring rebuttal to George W. Bush’s State of the Union, Jon Stewart quipped, “That was flat and dull. What state is she the governor of again?”

I wasn’t offended because we’re known for our sunsets and not our scenery.

That attitude probably affected how I viewed Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s “Everything Everywhere All at Once” a couple of weeks ago. As Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) struggles to make her laundromat work, one wonders why she doesn’t simply slip into one alternate universe and stay there.

In one, she and everyone else have hot dogs for fingers, so that might not be an ideal selection.

Still, being a glamorous movie star or a skilled martial artist has got to be more rewarding than dealing with her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), who’s too cowardly to tell her he wants a divorce or an IRS auditor (Jamie Lee Curtis) who seems a little too happy about making others’ lives miserable.

Kwan and Scheinert (collectively known as the Daniels) come up with lots of outrageous images. Curtis’ interoffice awards look creepy and become even more unsettling when we discover how they can be used to enter another dimension. These are the guys who gave us “Swiss Army Man,” but they seem to have developed both hearts and brains this time around (perhaps under the influence of “The Wizard of Oz”). The idea of instantly switching to another universe by doing something counterintuitive like wearing the wrong shoes on the wrong feet is pretty silly, so the hot dog fingers make sense in that context.

More importantly, the Daniels use their dimension hopping to reveal things about their characters that aren’t apparent in the supposedly real world. During the transitions, Waymond goes from being a whiny nebbish to a wise, compassionate fellow who can use office supplies to take out villains. As a result, it’s easy to care if he and Evelyn become the couple they thought they’d be when they were younger.

Quan hasn’t appeared in a film or TV episode in almost two decades and is probably best known as Harrison Ford’s sidekick in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” which he starred in as a child. Because he’s now a fresh face again, he doesn’t have a set persona, and it’s a delight to watch Waymond change is various dimensions, and Quan has the range to make all of Waymond’s personas convincing.

Yeoh, on the other hand, has always had a sort of regal bearing and usually plays patrician roles, but here she’s completely believable as a disoriented working class woman simply trying to get through an audit and family squabbles. Yeoh’s manner gives Evelyn the right amount of dignity to conquer all the chaos the Daniels throw her way. Yeoh has upstaged Jackie Chan and Pierce Brosnan’s James Bond, so she’s clearly a star, but she can make whatever she’s playing look real.

“Everything Everywhere All at Once” features an odd parody of “Ratatouille,” handtohand battles and literal office warfare. I caught the movie at an IMAX auditorium, and the Daniels manage to fill the screen with tasty eye candy despite a meager budget. That might explain why the film has been a relative success at the box office in the wake of a film market that has only partially recovered from covid.

The Daniels also manage to create believable people to put in these outrageous circumstances, so the film gets by on more than simply shock value. In fact, the main point of the film seems to be that people are at their most content when they’re honest about their circumstances — regardless of where they are.

Evelyn struggles because she can’t tell her father (the delightfully omnipresent James Hong) that her daughter Joy ( Stephanie Hsu) is lesbian. Much of her misery results from the fact that she hasn’t felt able to level with those around her. As she starts to speak more freely, even the IRS auditor becomes more likable. It probably doesn’t hurt that Curtis seems to be having a ball demonstrating her comedy chops and that she can be both petty and sympathetic in the same moment.

Maybe that’s why both Dorothy and Evelyn are happiest at home, but they might not have been if they’d merely stayed in the same dimension.

“Big Nose” (Jenny Slate) is a random laundromat customer who becomes a formidable opponent of a middle-aged Chinese immigrant trying to save the world in the science-fiction action comedy “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”