I dislike a lot of Asian American films. A lot of them are either boring, are rooted in insecurity, or have ideas about Asian America that would get a C in a freshman ethnic studies class. Even the ones that are good, like Minari, are just good enough. They don’t reach the ecstatic highs that make a film memorable for years to come, unless you’re specifically invested in being an Asian American Film Guy.

When I saw Everything Everywhere All At Once in March of 2022, it was like seeing my favorite, long-suffering sports team finally win a championship. That was not a premonition about the film’s future dominance at the Academy Awards. Even though I was certain this was a flat-out good movie, I wouldn’t have predicted it would take home a single Oscar. It was simply that someone had finally done it: made a movie about Asian American identity that was well-made, thoughtful, original, accessible, and confident in its execution.

The key to that last part is that it had other interests. Everything Everywhere is a multiversal adventure, a battle between nihilism and enlightenment, an homage to Asian cinema from Jackie Chan to Wong Kar-Wai and a Looney Tunes slapstick comedy. It gets to meaningful things about Asian American identity, but it is not so self-obsessed and insecure that this is its only thought process.

The antithesis of this is the Alan Yang-helmed Netlfix movie, Tigertail, which also cribs Wong Kar-Wai’s style but is supremely boring and has nothing interesting to say. Everything Everywhere is interested in the multiversal concept, yes, but it’s used to make us think: would our parents have a better life if they never immigrated to America? Do the seemingly stoic and closed-off immigrants actually contain movie star charisma and other multitudes that we don’t give them credit for? Why are our parents still worthy of love, even when they make it difficult?

For the film’s detractors, that last one seems to be one of the film’s many annoyances. The recurring theme in criticisms of the film is that it’s overly sentimental, earnest to a fault, and veers too often into loud corniness. The Ringer’s Adam Nayman did not care for the film’s overbearing optimism: “There’s a difference between choosing kindness and being bearhugged into submission.” In a recent recap of the 2023 Oscars, the LA Times’ Justin C. Chang wrote, “It’s so eager to bare its soul, to show you just how much its heart breaks for Evelyn and Joy and Waymond and Deirdre and everyone in the whole damn multiverse, that it practically does all your emoting for you. There’s almost no need — and no room — for a viewer to feel anything at all.”

When Chang writes that the film is so eager to bare its soul, I agree. In fact, it’s part of the appeal. It’s the same kind of appeal that drew me to emo music: a desire to state, simply and bluntly, how bad it feels without the self-conscious desire to dress it up as something poetic and literary. Sometimes a singer yelling “I’m not okay” to loud power chords is the most thrilling musical moment of a generation.

That’s not to say Leonard Cohen is bad; just that there’s room for both. Everything Everywhere’s decision to be frenetic, without spending much time to really drill down on the lived-in settingsof one particular universe, to me, isn’t a sign the filmmakers don’t know how to be subtle. It’s a deliberate decision to be more conceptual, more of a ride, and more interested in the themes.

I get it: a century of literary fiction and Palm D’Or winners tells us that stories should be elusive and sparse. Being mysterious is a value. But I don’t think that has to be automatically true. I think subscribing to that school of thought is like saying, “only songs with poetic lyrics are good,” or “only illustrations that are photo-realistic are good.” Mystery can be a value, but so can clarity, if the artist makes the right choices that makes it genre and goals clear.

It’s not like they fail the “show don’t tell” test on the script page. No one in the movie ever says, “The bagel represents nihilism” or “I may seem mean but if circumstances were different we would have the opportunity to see each other’s humanity.” It simply has the gall to show these things in ways that are easy to understand, in scenes that have a single purpose, and then eject into the next universe. It is, in its own way, unself-conscious about its overall emotionality.

In their interview with Marc Maron, the Daniels get into the topic of cringe:

MARON: That generation is now being adverse to emotions. They use words like “cringe” and “awkward,” it’s really a reaction to vulnerability. There’s a guardedness that’s happening around engaging true emotional vulnerability that’s a little disconcerting…

KWAN: Reflecting on the cringe thing is interesting because, when you live your life online and in social circles for the most part, especially ones driven by algorithms, there’s no grace for any mistakes. … Suddenly you have a whole generation of people who are fearful of looking like they made a mistake or are fearful of being the cringe person online.

Cringe is in the eye of the beholder. I can imagine many movies or television shows or pieces of art that made me cringe. It is an illusion to think that at a certain point, you just gain enough wisdom and maturity to know when something is just vulnerable enough to exude class.

Like many disagreements on art, it just comes down to the disposition of the audience. I grew up on emo music. My favorite science fiction is more Grant Morrison and less William Gibson. (By the way, this movie is like a pitch perfect Grant Morrison story. Daniels should adapt Flex Mentallo or Animal Man.) I am not averse to a writer being clever with a one liner, or having a statement about shared humanity articulated by swirling lights and tears.

The other disagreement simply comes from trust in the filmmakers. Nayman decries the film’s “careerist” overtones, as he’s certain the concept is just a desire to get a job doing a Marvel movie. Chang finds everyone’s favorite line, (“In another life, I would have really liked just doing laundry and taxes with you.”) as a carefully orchestrated corniness attack. But it seems to me if you have a positive (or zero) context of the filmmakers, these hesitations don’t loom as large. It’s just the benefit of the doubt that the filmmakers are as smart as you, the viewer.

Negativity bias is a weird thing. Despite being a broadly beloved film in the mainstream, validated commercially and critically and among the masses, its lukewarm-to-hostile reaction among specific members of film intelligentsia bothers me more than it should. Not that I’m angry at them. But it sure does seem like this scrutiny is the kind of thing that gets handwaved for most blockbusters, most songs, most mass market films. Is it not a calculated attack on the emotions when Top Gun Maverick kills off Val Kilmer’s character just before Maverick goes off on his big mission? Is it not a bearhug of pointed emotion when Padriac goes into a bar and monologues about niceness in the Banshees of Inisherin?

The only film among the nominees that doesn’t subscribe to that characterization is, unsurprisingly, the film that is almost universally liked among the film intelligentsia: Tár. But a film of that style, which refuses even the most cursory hand holding, is so exceedingly rare that it seems odd to make it the standard. And, in practice, the film becomes a Rorschach test about its themes. Whether you hate cancel culture, love it, or the best opinion you have is “it’s complicated,” this film will accommodate you. It can be read as deeply and as shallowly as you want.

I understand the reason that’s admirable. It’s flexible and gives you something to chew on. But some part of me is also suspicious of a film that refuses the mission to lead its viewer to an idea, and, instead, just throws the pieces to land where they may and says “it’ complicated.” It’s a simpler task to show a little bit of fairness, a little bit of unfairness, and then decide it’s impossible to know for sure. Sometimes, I admire art that wants to change my mind, or lead me to an outlook, or trick me, with humor and adventure, into believing in a basic human emotion.