Based on the short story “Why Don’t You Dance?” by Raymond Carver, Everything Must Go is a truly moving film centered on a downright astonishing dramatic performance by Will Ferrell. He stars as Nick Halsey, a long-time alcoholic who we sense has struggled and failed to kick his destructive habit several times. The film begins the day he loses his high-powered job (a disastrous, alcohol-fueled incident during a business trip to Denver is alluded to) and is also left by his wife. He returns home to find the locks changed and his belongings--everything from his favorite chair to his late father's vinyl collection to his toothbrush and mouthwash--spread across the front lawn. She's also frozen their bank account. Nick, depressed and defiant, stays on the lawn and later begins planning a life-purging yard sale. A hesitant friendship also blossoms between him and a new, very pregnant neighbor, Samantha (Rebecca Hall, who is always wonderful and does not misstep here).

This is writer/director Dan Rush's first feature, and he does a splendid job. He avoids the stylized, banal pitfalls of many suburbia-set indies (remember The Chumscrubber?). Everything Must Go is not interested in being an acidic, sweeping indictment of the modern American soul. It is a matter-of-fact, specific study of one man, the emotional and physical affects of his long-term alcoholism, and how he begins to maybe unburden his failing life. Rush's screenplay is full of spot-on small moments and truthful adult conversations. The best is perhaps a heartfelt, slightly strained strained visit a desperate Nick pays to an old high school acquaintance, played by an effervescent Laura Dern.

What Ferrell has accomplished here mustn't be understated. He not only completely sheds his buffoonish comic persona, he creates a flesh-and-blood, three-dimensional dramatic character, expertly projecting with his face the wounded soul of Nick Halsey.

He avoids giving the character any colorful quirks or playing him with any overly sentimental gestures. There's a sense of restraint and honesty to everything he does here. This is a character who has hit bottom, who is drowning in an abyss of alcohol, self-pity, and shattered illusions of happiness and success. Ferrell, as an actor, goes to those uneasy places and explores them, and the result is a poignant and often wrenching performance.

Everything Must Go ends on a very appropriate note--subtly optimistic, wistful. No grand declarations or easy answers, but definitely the sense one has just watched a very fine film and witnessed an iconic comedian reveal a very compelling and much darker new side of himself.

A-

Everything Must Go disappointed me quite a bit. The entire film goes by without really much going for it. The only part of the story that seemed to go anywhere were the scenes with Kenny and Samantha. The fact that we never meet Nick’s wife in the film hurts the film a good bit. There are a couple amusing parts but overall this was underwhelming. *1/2

I dug how the wife was never shown. It intensified the sudden plunge into isolation and loss the Ferrell character endures. A few scenes trying to show the wife's inner life would have just seemed trite. It's his story.

And it's Ferrell's most full-bodied, compelling performance to date by far. A small, minor-key movie, to be sure, but one with impact.

Not a bad movie. Will Ferrell was good, as was Rebecca Hall.

7/10 (B-)

Everything Must Go

Well it's nice to see Will Ferrell in a dramatic role. He's good, and I'd like to see him do more of this type of role. His demeanour and attitude lends itself nicely to playing the failure or victim. But apart from Ferrell, the film is just too slow, and thus it becomes dull. Not enough happens. The interactions with Kenny are not as sweet or heart warming as Rush believes them to be. The fact that he turns his approach around in 5 days is just too convenient, and very unrealistic. The last scenes where he goes about being nice and giving things to everyone in his life; it's just the clichéd Hollywood closure template.

C