Everything Must Go (Will Ferrel Dramedy)

[Foggy]

Source:TIFF (go on there to see some offical stills)

Everything Must Go – at once a sales pitch and a surrender to fate – is a perfectly apt title for this melancholic yet entertaining film that dismantles the structures, behaviours and relationships we have come to consider normal.

Nicolas Halsey (Will Ferrell) is not having a good day. Not only has he been fired from his sales-manager job of sixteen years, but he returns home to find the locks changed and his belongings strewn outside, the spoils of his failed marriage scattered across the lawn for all the world to see.

So starts Everything Must Go, a wryly humorous drama starring Ferrell, which examines five endless days in the life of a man who believes he has lost everything. Deciding to both fight and give up, Nick appropriates the object-laden lawn as his living room; he stations himself in a recliner and entertains himself with neighbour-watching, while steadily chipping away at his six-month sobriety. When the police show up to shut down the illicit spectacle, he invokes a legal loophole that buys him four more days of lawn-time: residents of Plano, Texas are permitted to hold private yard sales for a maximum of five consecutive days.

That first-time screenwriter and director Dan Rush succeeds in crafting a feature-length film from Raymond Carver’s understated prose (the script is an adaptation of his short story “Why Don’t You Dance?”) is a testament both to the evocative power of Carver’s minimalism and to the imaginative expertise of Rush. The story represents only a short span of time and space, yet it is consistently engaging, tracking Nick’s schizophrenic oscillations of grief, sorrow, hope and liberated inebriation as he befriends a lonely teenager, offers unsolicited advice to his new, pregnant neighbour (Rebecca Hall) and comes to terms with saying goodbye to a life he is unlikely to reclaim.

Ferrell’s nuanced portrayal of Nick elicits gut-wrenching empathy one moment, disappointed repugnance the next. He wears his pain visibly – but never melodramatically – even as he fights through it with deadpan humour and self-deprecation.