Greatly expanded from a four-page, single-situation short story by Raymond Carver, Dan Rush's first feature Everything Must Go is an ambitious if enervated vehicle for Will Ferrell--playing it straight as Nick Halsey, a middle-class drunk fired from his job and locked out of his suburban home by an irate, never-seen spouse on the same day.
As in the Carver story, Halsey uses the belongings his wife has dumped outside to set up house on the front lawn. His public humiliation, complete with repossessed company car and suspended bank account, is barely mitigated by the police detective (Michael Peña) who happens to be his AA sponsor and allows him a five-day grace period in which to operate an impromptu, highly metaphoric, yard sale --compelled to re-evaluate his past in the light of a cataclysmic present.
An ungainly presence who occupies far too much space, cultural and
otherwise, Ferrell is one of the least sympathetic personalities in
movies. To his credit, he makes almost no attempt here to woo the
audience, although his self-pitying lug, usually seen parked outside in
his Barcalounger, brewski in paw, eventually extracts a modicum of
sympathy just by being there. Also by hitting bottom: outta money, outta
beer, reduced to panhandling outside the mini-mart.
Rush has a background in commercials but the rootsy soundtrack
(Lightnin' Hopkins, Ramblin' Jack, Odetta, The Band) doesn't succeed in
selling the movie as an American ballad. Everything Must Go, which is
ostensibly set in Scottsdale, Arizona, has a generic resemblance to
broken-heartland movies like Up in the Air and Cedar Rapids, although
this suburban meltdown is more depressed than either.
Such warmth as it exists is generated by Halsey's two new friends, a
lonely little boy (14-year-old Christopher Jordan Wallace, son of the
Notorious B.I.G.) and the pregnant, quasi-abandoned young wife across
the street (Rebecca Hall), as well as the high school classmate he's
inspired to look up (Laura Dern, who brightens the movie instantly if
briefly).
In the final reel, Rush introduces a plot complication that, had the
preceding hour been leaner, might have worked--kind of like the Titanic
sinking to reveal an iceberg. Still, I can't dismiss the desperate
social realism of a movie offering the solace of a bromide found in a
fortune cookie.
--J. Hoberman
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