It’s a joy to watch Yeoh go ... in any universe
Everything Everywhere All At Once (15, 139mins)
Verdict: Multiverse of more madness
Father Stu (15, 124mins) ★★★★I Verdict: Badly paced biopic ★★III
ANSWER me this, Nobel physicists: what do you call a multitude of multiverses? A multimultiverse? The infiniverse? Whatever the word, it is what’s afflicting — oh, gosh — multiplexes at the moment. After last week’s Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness, we now have another film about overlapping, parallel universes. This one is called Everything Everywhere All At Once, presumably because it originated in a universe without commas.
But, really, it’s the differences between the two films that stand out, rather than their cosmic similarities. Everything Everywhere isn’t the next stage of Marvel’s global supremacy plan.
It is, instead, the latest release from A24, the New York-based film company behind such inventive, independent-spirited fare as 2019’s Uncut Gems and last year’s The Green Knight. What’s more, Everything Everywhere stars Michelle Yeoh.
In fact, technically speaking, it stars lots of Michelle Yeohs. And that is a very good thing indeed. At the beginning, though, this is not the Yeoh we know: the balletic martial artist from films such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000).
Here, she plays Evelyn Wang, the owner of a struggling launderette in Somewheresville,
Pictures:ALLYSONRIGGS/KARENBALLARD America, whose life is like an extended heart attack.
Bills haven’t been paid. A pathologically dreary IRS agent (played by an almost unrecognisable, and very funny, Jamie Lee Curtis) is on her case. Her sad-eyed husband (Ke Huy Quan) is resigned to a divorce. And will someone — please — just bring some food to her querulous dad (James Hong)?
If that sounds stressful, well, it is — for the viewer, as much as for Wang. Everything Everywhere is mostly a comedy (and, at times, a hilarious one), but somehow it pulls off the magical trick of making you feel how its characters feel. Harried. Bewildered. Upset.
Then, about 20 minutes in, comes the exhilaration. That’s when an alternate-universe version of Wang’s husband, going by the call sign ‘Alpha Waymond’, breaks into her reality to inform her that A) a universal peril, who may or may not be their daughter (played by the brilliant Stephanie Hsu), is spreading itself through time and space, and B) she is the only person who can stop it. Suddenly, the film really gets to show off some of that A24 inventiveness. There are different universes, different chronologies and even different cinematic styles — peculiarly, one of the alternate worlds is a dead ringer for Wong Kar-wai’s In The Mood For Love (2000). Yet co-director-writers Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert manage to make it all cohere.
And Yeoh gets to show off, too. Turns out, there’s an alternateuniverse version of Evelyn Wang who made a few different life choices and ended up as, basically, Michelle Yeoh — a kung fu superstar. Wang ‘verse-jumps’ (don’t ask) to gain the same skills, and starts punching and pirouetting her way through a series of increasingly colourful fight scenes.
Followed by more fight scenes. And more fight scenes. And … there probably is a point at which Everything Everywhere lives up to its name and becomes too much. In its search for a meaning, the film can’t decide between about three, so it just goes on with more brawls, more movie references, more puerile gags and more sentiment.
But, still, more Yeoh is more Yeoh. There may be some awful universe where she isn’t one of the most capable, likeable frontwomen in film, but, thankfully, it’s not this one.
n ‘I AIN’T doing none of that bluecollar bull **** !’ wails Mark Wahlberg at the start of Father Stu. What follows is two hours of bluecollar … boilerplate might be a better word.
The soundtrack is full of twangy country guitars and Dolly Parton. The men are burly and grizzled. There’s a lot of cussin’ and scrappin’.
But there’s also an extraordinary true story underpinning it. Father Stu, Wahlberg’s character, is Stuart Long, a small-town boxer who became a priest and then fought 12 rounds with a rare and terrible degenerative illness. He died, aged 50, almost a decade ago.
The film tells this story all the way through, presumably with some Hollywood embellishment. I doubt, for instance, that there was a reptilian-looking bad guy at the real seminary who constantly hissed at Father Stu’s rough and rowdy ways — but there is one here.
Yet, in other places, there isn’t embellishment — or explanation — enough. Compared with the attention paid to Father Stu’s wooing of a church-going gal (Teresa Ruiz), the film doesn’t provide much reason for his true conversion to Christianity later on. Even his struggle with the disease, the most remarkable part of it, feels like an addendum.
Which is a shame because the actors, especially Wahlberg, have clearly approached the material earnestly. Jacki Weaver is great as Stu’s hard-loving mum. Mel Gibson is just as good as the crazyeyed, beer-swilling, intolerant dad who achieves a late redemption … which sounds a bit like Gibson.
In this world of second chances, maybe extend Father Stu just the one — if only to know something of the man who inspired it.