Nick Halsey is getting fired. It doesn’t matter that he’s been top dog in his sales district. His brawl with an important customer, and arrest for a DUI, show that he’s lost his grip. Will Ferrell stars in the deadpan comedy Everything Must Go.
Nick’s day gets worse. He arrives home to find all his possessions – clothes, old records, trophies – dumped on the front lawn. His wife is gone. The locks have been changed. Nick leaves a message on her voicemail. “Can’t this happen another day?”
Based on the Raymond Carver short story Why Don’t You Dance?, the film develops beautifully the modern day loneliness of Carver’s characters. Ferrell (Stranger Than Fiction) nails it with an open, vulnerable performance. Writer director Dan Rush keeps it unsentimental, following Nick’s plodding and occasionally delightful progress.
Marooned on his front yard, his car repossessed and bank account frozen, Nick is forced to take stock and embark on an odyssey. Luckily it seldom rains in Phoenix (although there are lawn sprinklers to contend with). He settles back in his leather easy chair, gulping his way through two six packs. An unexpected ally Kenny (Christopher Jordan Wallace of Notorious) shows up, riding his bike, asking questions.
Kenny is a chubby neighborhood kid, smart, enterprising and fatherless. Samantha (Rebecca Hall of The Town) is Nick’s pretty, pregnant new neighbor, a good listener who’s waiting for her husband to arrive from across the country. Delilah (dynamic Laura Dern), with her exquisitely pained smile, is the soulful, empathetic high school friend who signed Nick’s yearbook.
Nick’s A.A. sponsor Frank Garcia (Michael Pena), a police detective, can keep him out of jail for five days as long as Nick calls his situation a yard sale. He’s losing patience with his friend’s on-again, off-again sobriety.
Nick consoles himself by breaking into his own back yard and pissing in his wife’s fishpond of Japanese koi. He watches home movies outdoors. His father was a mean drunk. His mother did love him. Nick bumps into his kinky neighbor (Stephen Root, hilarious) and his ex-boss (Glenn Howerton, textbook obnoxious).
Are we friends? Nick’s turning point is teaching Kenny baseball, embracing “a little less me and a little more we.” Eventually he faces the truth: he’s got to let go of his possessions, the debris of his life. He hires Kenny to help him with the yard sale.
“Give the customers what they want,” Nick coaches Kenny. “Make it easy for them to buy.” It turns out that Kenny has a knack for people pleasing and making sales. Soon he’s reading The Sales Bible, negotiating the best deals and slowly clearing the front yard.
Lashing out at sweet Samantha one day, Nick realizes how difficult he can be. Still he yearns to win back his wife, who we never meet. Visiting Delilah, Nick sees her making the best of raising two kids on her own. “You have a good heart, Nicholas. That doesn’t change,” she tells him.
There’s no grand epiphany in Everything Must Go. Change is ongoing, sometimes maddeningly slow. Friends can help.
If you like Everything Must Go, you might enjoy: Solitary Man; Barney’s Version; A Serious Man.
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Everything Must Go 2010 / R / 1 hour, 36 min
Cast Overview: Will Ferrell, Rebecca Hall, Michael Pena, Christopher Jordan Wallace, Glenn Howerton, Stephen Root, Laura Dern
Director: Dan Rush
Genre: Indie Drama, Dramedy, Dark Comedy
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