First Hit: One of the better acted Ferrell films.
As many of you know from reading this blog, I’m not a Will Ferrell fan and I find most of his comedy to be about Will Ferrell acting like himself with a light façade of character portrait.
In “Everything Must Go” he showed that he can act well enough for me to forget that it was Will Ferrell on the screen but a real character. As Nick Halsey, he is a struggling alcoholic and top salesman with a large firm based out of Arizona In the opening sequence he is being fired for an incident he doesn’t fully recall during one of his slip-ups.
He pleads with his boss to give him another chance but then his boss reads off a long list of problems over the last few years and that he’s run out of chances. He comes home to find all his stuff on the front lawn of his house, his wife is gone, and the door locks have been changed. So what does he do, he starts drinking beer (his drink of choice) in the front yard in his favorite leather chair.
A young boy named Kenny (played by Christopher Jordan Wallace) who is riding his bicycle around the neighborhood stops and talks with him. He asks Kenny to watch his stuff while buys more beer. A woman named Samantha (played by Rebecca Hall) is moving in across the street and she befriends him as he sits outside his house drinking beer.
Nick has a sponsor who is a lieutenant on the police force. Frank (played by Michael Pena) tells him that he only has 5 days to get rid of the stuff on the lawn. So he gets ready to conduct a lawn sale.
In the end Nick gets that he needs to change his life and one of the things he realizes is that "Everything Must Go."
Ferrell is pretty good in this role. I actually forgot that it was Ferrell on the screen and became more engaged with his character. Wallace was wonderful as the young man who wanted a friend and found one in Nick. Hall was good as a steadfast woman hoping to save her marriage and as a neighbor who may end up like Nick’s wife. Pena was also good as Nick’s AA sponsor and friend. Laura Dern had a small role as an old high school friend of Nick’s and she did this well. Dan Rush and Raymond Carver wrote a strong script. There were a couple of misses, like Nick had his wallet when he went to the store, so the line to the police officers that his wallet was in his car, which was taken, was out of continuity. Dan Rush also directed this story and he had a pretty good feel for the story and characters in it.
Overall: A good film but it will have a limited audience.