Like the endless possibilities contained within the movie itself, if you asked a dozen people coming out of Everything Everywhere All at Once what their main takeaway was, you’d likely get a dozen different answers. The themes, connections, and wildly inventive filmmaking come spilling out of this movie at warp speed. The second film from the directing team known as Daniels – the duo is made up of Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert – is even more bonkers than their first, the inexplicably goofy Swiss Army Man. This time they have the outlandish budget to match their outlandish ideas. The result is a joyous, dense take on human existence that celebrates hope and empathy.
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Sometimes a movie comes along that defies any kind of deep intellectual interpretation. It simply unspools its crazy internal logic before your eyes and dares you not to get caught up in the madness you’re witnessing. Swiss Army Man is that movie. It takes the concept of magical realism and twists everything you think you know about narrative expectation into a pretzel. For ninety minutes, I could not believe what I was seeing. I was so caught up in what would happen next, the full joy of the experience didn’t hit me until it was all over. Part of that was never being able to predict where the script was going.
The guys who wrote and directed that script, Dan Kwan and Daniel Sheinert (credited jointly as “Daniels”), establish within the first ten minutes that Swiss Army Man would be crazily, stupefyingly original. When the hero rides a farting corpse like a jet ski to escape a deserted island, I knew the writers were issuing a cinematic challenge. I’ll admit, I was hesitant at first. I can enjoy potty humor as well as anyone, at least in limited doses. But when Hank (Paul Dano) investigates the dead body that washes up on the desolate beach where he's stranded, all that happens at first is the farting. I wondered if that would be the extent of the writer-directors’ imagination. Then came the aforementioned riding of the corpse like a jet ski, with Hank pulling on the dead man’s necktie like a throttle for increased speed. Challenge accepted.
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