Ratings
THE DAILY: 2.5 Stars out of 5
ROTTEN TOMATOES: 78%
Will Ferrell has made a living playing characters with a talent for self-deception — sad clowns who know neither that they’re sad nor that people are laughing at them. His gift, as an actor, is for a certain indefatigable optimism, a trait that redeems the often otherwise charmless men he plays. But in “Everything Must Go,” the debut feature from director Dan Rush, it’s this exact quality Ferrell targets for extinction in Nick Halsey, a middle-aged salesman who begins the film in an office of a smirking younger superior, where he is given a commemorative Swiss Army knife, prelude to an unceremonious firing.
Nick probably deserves it — he has a drinking problem, a disillusioned sponsor and, as he comes home to find out, an estranged wife, who has changed the locks and strewn his possessions across the modest lawn of their suburban Phoenix home. In the rubble is evidence of a bourgeois life gone awry, or never properly consummated: an unused fishing rod, a kayak, tiki torches, a saxophone, samurai swords, snow globes, the trophies of a man with income but no real curiosity. His foundations thus swept away, Nick sits down in a chair, cracks a six-pack and begins a sour vigil for any scrap of meaning that might be left to him.
Adapted from a Raymond Carver story (the slim “Why Don’t You Dance?”) but told via the glossy visuals of a TV ad — Rush’s day job is as a commercial director — “Everything Must Go” can feel dissonant a times: Kmart realism by way of the shrill Hollywood moralizing of films like Jason Reitman’s “Up in the Air.” Nick’s father, we eventually learn, was an alcoholic too, and not much of a family man either — “a drunk who occasionally did interesting things,” says Nick.
Filling out Carver’s original 1,600-word sketch, Rush installs a newly arrived Samantha (a lush- looking Rebecca Hall) across the street. Her husband, who has yet to show up, is essentially a younger Nick, a regional executive on his way up — until, it is more than hinted at, he too wakes up in 10 or 20 years with a drinking problem and a wife who has had more than enough. We are doomed to become our parents, Rush is saying — or if not them, at least our equally venal neighbors.
The film’s tidy symbolism is not helped by its central conceit, either — a yard sale, in which Nick must sell off all his possessions (it’s this excuse that allows him to live on his own lawn for five days), and thus free himself from the literal baggage of life lived not particularly well the first time around. An overweight neighborhood kid, Kenny Loftus (Christopher “CJ” Wallace, a disconcertingly good actor and the son of slain rapper Notorious B.I.G.), already accustomed to disappointment, hangs around until Nick caves and allows him to help. The two eventually jar one another out of their respective resignations, though not before Nick makes an ill-advised house call on an old high school classmate (Laura Dern, who should be in every movie ever) and pees in his soon-to-be-ex- wife’s koi pond.
Awkward encounters and nude antics are Fer- rell’s forte. He wrings comedy out of the character without ever making him that sympathetic, and he plays Nick’s gradual recognition of the indignities that have made up his life until this point nearly perfectly. On Ferrell’s face, you can watch the high ground recede inexorably from Nick even as he goes about righting his life. He forgives without the expectation of being forgiven himself, displaying an intelligence that belies — and transcends — the otherwise tidy morality play he finds himself in.
THE DAILY: 2.5 Stars out of 5
ROTTEN TOMATOES: 78%
Will Ferrell has made a living playing characters with a talent for self-deception — sad clowns who know neither that they’re sad nor that people are laughing at them. His gift, as an actor, is for a certain indefatigable optimism, a trait that redeems the often otherwise charmless men he plays. But in “Everything Must Go,” the debut feature from director Dan Rush, it’s this exact quality Ferrell targets for extinction in Nick Halsey, a middle-aged salesman who begins the film in an office of a smirking younger superior, where he is given a commemorative Swiss Army knife, prelude to an unceremonious firing.
Nick probably deserves it — he has a drinking problem, a disillusioned sponsor and, as he comes home to find out, an estranged wife, who has changed the locks and strewn his possessions across the modest lawn of their suburban Phoenix home. In the rubble is evidence of a bourgeois life gone awry, or never properly consummated: an unused fishing rod, a kayak, tiki torches, a saxophone, samurai swords, snow globes, the trophies of a man with income but no real curiosity. His foundations thus swept away, Nick sits down in a chair, cracks a six-pack and begins a sour vigil for any scrap of meaning that might be left to him.
Adapted from a Raymond Carver story (the slim “Why Don’t You Dance?”) but told via the glossy visuals of a TV ad — Rush’s day job is as a commercial director — “Everything Must Go” can feel dissonant a times: Kmart realism by way of the shrill Hollywood moralizing of films like Jason Reitman’s “Up in the Air.” Nick’s father, we eventually learn, was an alcoholic too, and not much of a family man either — “a drunk who occasionally did interesting things,” says Nick.
Filling out Carver’s original 1,600-word sketch, Rush installs a newly arrived Samantha (a lush- looking Rebecca Hall) across the street. Her husband, who has yet to show up, is essentially a younger Nick, a regional executive on his way up — until, it is more than hinted at, he too wakes up in 10 or 20 years with a drinking problem and a wife who has had more than enough. We are doomed to become our parents, Rush is saying — or if not them, at least our equally venal neighbors.
The film’s tidy symbolism is not helped by its central conceit, either — a yard sale, in which Nick must sell off all his possessions (it’s this excuse that allows him to live on his own lawn for five days), and thus free himself from the literal baggage of life lived not particularly well the first time around. An overweight neighborhood kid, Kenny Loftus (Christopher “CJ” Wallace, a disconcertingly good actor and the son of slain rapper Notorious B.I.G.), already accustomed to disappointment, hangs around until Nick caves and allows him to help. The two eventually jar one another out of their respective resignations, though not before Nick makes an ill-advised house call on an old high school classmate (Laura Dern, who should be in every movie ever) and pees in his soon-to-be-ex- wife’s koi pond.
Awkward encounters and nude antics are Fer- rell’s forte. He wrings comedy out of the character without ever making him that sympathetic, and he plays Nick’s gradual recognition of the indignities that have made up his life until this point nearly perfectly. On Ferrell’s face, you can watch the high ground recede inexorably from Nick even as he goes about righting his life. He forgives without the expectation of being forgiven himself, displaying an intelligence that belies — and transcends — the otherwise tidy morality play he finds himself in.
