Starring: Will Ferrell, Rebecca Hall and Laura Dern
Directed By: Dan Rush
Screenplay By: Dan Rush
Based On: the Short Story “Why Don’t You Dance?” by Raymond Carver
Produced By: Marty Bowen and Wyck Godfrey
Distributor: Lionsgate
Rating: R
Running Time: Approximately 96 minutes
Website: everythingmustgo-themovie.com
Budget: $8 million
Genre: Comedy
Release Date: May 13, 2011
It seems like every once in a while every successful movie comedian tries to prove to audiences that they can still Capital-A Act. Every once in a great while these men or women will stop their mugging and their clowning and put away their catch phrases to attempt something that does not directly riff on their on-screen persona. Adam Sandler, for example, will occasionally pause his career of employing all his friends and making scads of money playing himself to star in movies like Punch Drunk Love and Spanglish. Steve Carell will occasionally bust his “Office” persona in projects like Little Miss Sunshine and Dan in Real Life.
Will Ferrell – known to millions as Ron Burgundy, Ricky Bobby, Frank the Tank, and Buddy the Elf, among others – broke slightly from his usual role of playing manic, idiotically endearing man-children to star in Stranger Than Fiction… in which he played a neurotic, idiotically endearing man-child. It was enough of a departure from his usual character that people began to notice that Ferrell might not have range, but he does have depth.
Ferrell branches out again in Everything Must Go, based on and heavily extrapolating from the short story “Why Don’t You Dance?” by late American minimalist Raymond Carver. Ferrell plays Nick Halsey, a depressed salesman for a non-descript Arizona firm who gets fired by his smug boss (Glenn Howerton of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”) after falling off the wagon one time too many. Nick’s day gets worse when he returns home to find his wife has left him, chucked all his belongings onto the front lawn, and changed all the locks on their home.
Taking advantage of a local law that allows a bereft Nick and a lifetime’s worth of belongings to stay out on the lawn under the guise of a “yard sale,” Nick spends his time on an alcohol-fueled bender looking for a way to reconcile with his absentee wife. Along the way, he meets an equally lonely neighborhood boy (Christopher Jordan Wallace), chats up an old high school friend (Laura Dern), and strikes up a tentative relationship with pregnant newlywed Samantha (Rebecca Hall of Vicky Cristina Barcelona), who has just moved in across the street. In the meantime, the movie lives up to its title: everything must go, and as you might imagine, Nick indeed has a lot of baggage.
Alcoholic relapses, marital disintegration, regret for a misspent life, the tentative grasp for a connection in an isolating world – not exactly the things that come to mind when one thinks, “a Will Ferrell movie.” Don’t let Ferrell’s presence fool you: this is a comedy of bittersweet proportions, not the typical flailing one associates with Anchorman or Talladega Nights. For that reason, it’s difficult to say who Everything Must Go is for. Ferrell is an asset to the movie, but also its biggest obstacle. Fans will be turned off by the movie’s wry, deadpan aimlessness; audiences who might go along with first-time writer-director Dan Rush’s wistful tone are unlikely to see past Ferrell’s persona.
Ferrell is to be commended for branching out, though the results are uneven. Hall’s Samantha is the kind of quirky, radiant woman that only seems to exist in independent films, a redemptive figure inexplicably drawn to the older Nick’s sad-sack malaise. In a lot of ways, Everything Must Go follows a fairly standard metric for this kind of pleasantly angst-ridden comedy/drama: there’s no real meaning to the universe. But enough plot contrivances pile up, even in a movie that mostly takes place on a suburban lawn, to suggest that there might be answers somewhere. It’s a movie about everything and nothing, with Nick the zen figure questing for meaning. Not particularly funny, not especially dramatic, Everything Must Go is nonetheless admirable in its attempts to address the dilemma of the modern mid-life crisis with humor and heart (and without melodrama). To paraphrase Ron Burgundy: Stay classy, Will Ferrell.
2 Stars
