Late in Everything Must Go, off-the-wagon alcoholic Nick Halsey (Will Ferrell) suggests that expectant mother Samantha (Rebecca Hall) paint her child’s nursery blue, because the color is soothing. Blue, of course, also symbolizes sadness, and the moment sums up the tone of the film, which is soothingly sad throughout — from its hazy, sun-soaked photography (it was shot on location in Phoenix), to its bluesy soundtrack, and to, most of all, its quietly moving performances. Few films attempt, much less achieve, the incredible delicacy first-time writer-director Dan Rush gets through much of this film.
Everything Must Go is based on the short story “Why Don’t You Dance?” by Raymond Carver, whose work has inspired a number of shorts (including the Australian Everything Goes, based on the same story) but only two other features: Ray Lawrence’s Jindabyne and Robert Altman’s Short Cuts. Unlike Altman, who wove nine Carver stories and one poem into a dazzling tapestry that retained Carver’s essence while being distinctly his own, Rush uses his source material as a jumping-off point. In fact, his film has little to do with the story, aside from the basic conceit — a man sells his belongings on his front lawn after his wife has left him — and it makes room for some most un-Carver-like sentimentality. In the story, the man has decided to put everything out and sell it; in the film, the man comes home from losing his job to find that his wife has locked him out of the house and hired movers to dump all his belongings outside. Where Carver remained oblique, embedding complex observations in deceptive simplicity, Rush invites us to spend time with the characters.
While camped out on his lawn, Nick forms two key relationships: one with Samantha, who moves in across the street and grows increasingly disconsolate as she waits (and waits) for her husband to join her; and another with Kenny (Christopher Jordan Wallace), a pudgy boy who hangs around and ends up helping Nick sell his stuff. (The always-welcome Laura Dern also shows up as a former classmate to whom Nick pays a visit.) These relationships provide the basis for a series of closely observed moments that are so consistently good, so subtly insightful that the lack of narrative drive doesn’t matter — the movie floats along with some of the mesmerizing gentleness of Hal Ashby’s Being There. When Rush decides he needs to hit a beat or force an epiphany, though, you can feel the gears grinding — the plot contrivances with which he attempts to wrench the film into mainstream shape clash with the natural flow of the characters’ behavior and relationships. These moments are usually signaled by the appearance of Frank (Michael Peña), who, as a police detective and Nick’s AA sponsor, has no clear motivations of his own but rather serves as a catchall device to do whatever Rush thinks the story requires. There are some trite observations about corporate heartlessness and suburban alienation, and there’s one unfortunate sequence in which a character is made to feel ashamed of his sexual proclivities. And the film doesn’t confront alcoholism head-on — neither the depths to which it takes people, nor the grinding difficulty of getting and staying sober. But on the whole, it is compassionately, gracefully tender in its handling of the comedy of despair.
Between blockbusters, Ferrell has taken rare, tentative steps beyond the doofus manchild act that has made him one of the most popular comic stars in the world today. He seemed no more out of place than anyone else in the Woody Allen misfire Melinda and Melinda, and he milked some nicely understated moments from two semi-serious roles that dovetailed with his standard persona (a supporting turn in the self-consciously quirky Winter Passing and the lead in the half-clever, half-irritating Stranger than Fiction). But Everything Must Go gives him the most (or, arguably, first) fully realized adult character of his film career. The role affords him ample opportunity for humor, but the humor springs from a serious core. Nick Halsey is not unlike the middle-aged failures Bill Murray plays so effortlessly. Because Ferrell is less naturally expressive than Murray, he has to work harder, yet there isn’t a hint of strain in his controlled, subtle, all-of-a-piece performance. (Watch him combine anger, fear, and relief after an encounter with a couple of teen punks in a convenience-store parking lot.) He’s also younger, which gives the sense of failure more sting — and more hope of recovery. Ferrell is matched by Hall, an intelligent, magnetic presence who in the past few years has become a good reason to see anything she’s in. And Wallace, in his first film role, is a natural.
As for Rush, Everything Must Go is an auspicious, confident, deeply humane debut. If he trusts his grasp of character to propel his next film without resorting to storytelling clichés, he may end up with a masterpiece.
