Feeling sad that I haven't been going to the movies lately, I decided this would be my "weekend of the multiverse," going to see first this odd indie creation and then the product of the vast Marvel machine tomorrow or Sunday. The last time I went to the cinema, and the only previous time I've gone during the pandemic, was for Dune. Picking a weekday showing in the early afternoon assured me that the theater would have only a few people, which I still think is preferable in this era of plague.
The directors of the film, who go collectively by "Daniels," (making them part of the group that my oldest friend and I coined when we were in Middle School, the Dan Clan - I guess Dans just gravitate toward one another) previously made Swiss Army Man, one of those batshit premises that works shockingly well (Paul Dano is shipwrecked on a desert island and finds Daniel Radcliffe's washed-up corpse, who happens to be very useful in various ways) return with a story about the kind of broad malaise of wasted potential and existential drift that I think a lot of people have been feeling in the past few years.
At the center of this is Evelyn Wang, played by Michelle Yeoh, a Chinese immigrant living in what seems to be southern California. Whatever dreams she once had have been submerged beneath the need to run a failing laundromat that she lives above, dealing with what she sees as her sort of pathetic husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan,) the distant daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu), about whom she feels conflicted that she's got a white girlfriend (both the white and the girl parts) and a father whose expectations have always weighed down on her (James Hong).
While going into the local IRS office to be audited - notably for equipment related to hobbies - Waymond suddenly shifts into some other personality, and reveals that he's been seeking her out as the one who can defeat "Jobu Tabacky," a villain who threatens the entire multiverse.
As she is initiated into this bizarre technology that allows the multiversal travel of her consciousness, picking up skills and abilities that other versions of her have acquired, we get into the absurd, ridiculous action story that is, ultimately, about regret and depression - regret about the choices we didn't make and depression about the ultimate meaninglessness of our own lives in the face of an ever-expanding vision of the cosmos.
It's the sort of movie where there'll be a fight scene where she's trying to prevent a bad guy from sticking something in his butt lest that give him better fighting skills, while another scene will be about the deep pain of passing on the pressures that caused you so much trauma to your own child.
It's funny, because I've been doing a lot of unpacking about generational trauma, and this is very much about the sort of internalization and even projection of fears and resentments.
In particular, I think that the movie has a lot to say about regret - there's a scene where Evelyn accesses the sign-spinning skills of a version of her that flips around one of those road signs for a pizza place, and then uses that skill in her version of the world to fight off a bunch of bad guys with a riot shield. There's a sort of suggestion that the value and potential of every life experience is there, even if we don't really see it.
And this applies to others as well - it's clear that Evelyn sees Waymond as something of a pathetic doormat at first, and that resentment is leading him to consider getting a divorce. But when we see him in a different timeline - one in which they never married - he explains how his worldview might not be conventional, but it's just as, if not stronger than what it could have been.
No comments:
Post a Comment