Woman of the Month: Evelyn Quan Wang

Evelyn Quan Wang in Everything Everywhere All at Once

Some of these entries chose themselves, and this month was always going to be Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn Wang. What a character, what a performance!

She’s a middle-aged Chinese-American immigrant and laundromat owner who is clearly enduring rather than enjoying her life. With a stressful tax audit, a judgmental visiting father, a husband vying for a divorce, and a gay daughter whose orientation she still wants to keep under-wraps, Evelyn is not the most auspicious heroine of any type of movie. But as Yeoh said in her Oscar acceptance speech: “ladies, don't let anybody tell you you're ever past your prime.”

While at the IRD office, an alternative-world version of her husband Waylan pulls her into a janitor’s closet and gives her some mindboggling news: the multiverse is real, and in his reality, Evelyn is a genius scientist who discovered a way of sending her consciousness into every version of herself across the aforementioned multiverse. But in doing so, Evelyn destroyed the mind of her own daughter, who is now a nihilistic supervillain intent on destroying all existence, in every version of reality.

Evelyn has to – you know, stop her. With a quick primer on how mental world-hopping works, Evelyn is soon tapping into the knowledge and skills of her alt-world doppelgangers, learning more about herself and her family in the process – from the life she would have led had she never married Wayland (which looks like her life as Michelle Yeoh) to what history would have been like if humankind evolved hotdog fingers.

The most important thing about Evelyn as a character is that the film doesn’t shy away from her very-real faults. She does treat her husband and daughter badly. She does have a grim and unappealing outlook on life. She is a real struggle to be around. The disappointment on her daughter’s face when Evelyn describes her girlfriend as a “good friend” to her grandfather hits like a freight train. She hurts the people she’s supposed to care about, and it’s from the bottom of this pit that Evelyn must climb.

Or as this review points out: It's a story about an anonymous loser who discovers that they are actually incredibly special, but whereas most stories like this focus on young people, here the heroine is middle aged and trying to come to terms with the fact that she's probably made all the big choices in her life already—and what makes her special, it turns out, is that all those choices were the wrong ones. (Also, let's not ignore how unusual it is for a woman to be the protagonist of this sort of story, much less a woman of colour.)

The levels of characterization that the screenplay gives his woman is extraordinary, and Yeoh is more than capable of parsing through them all. This movie – as its title indicates – is about so many things, and Evelyn is at the axis of all that, juggling the multitude of storylines and characters that ripple out from our first glimpse of her sitting at a cluttered desk, grumpily rifling through tax-related forms. I hope I get the chance to watch it again soon, as I guarantee you’ll spot something new and ingenious each time.