Everything Must Go was not Will Ferrell’s (Old School, Blades of Glory) first attempt at anything more than silly humor. He did a great job as a socially awkward and isolated IRS agent in Stranger Than Fiction. In more of a subdued role (Winter Passing), Ferrell plays a would-be musician. This movie could have been better, and Ferrell looked out of place. While he can still crank out $100 million laugh-out-loud comedies (2010’s The Other Guys, 2008’s Step Brothers), he is still trying to show the world that he can do more than make people laugh. He does just that in Everything Must Go, a movie with a few subtle laughs but one with its lead character not delivering the joke. In this regard, the film did an excellent job.

The premise of the movie is a simple one. An alcoholic loses his job and his wife because his addiction becomes more important than being a good husband or an employable member of society. That is easy enough to believe. We see it every day. We might have somebody very close to us going through that situation, or perhaps we’ve gone through something like that ourselves. Unfortunately for Nick Hasley (Ferrell), these two events occur in the afternoon. Nick returns home after being fired to find all his worldly possessions in his front yard and a note from his wife (a recovering alcoholic) telling him that she has left him. Nick then finds his house’s locks changed, his car repossessed, and his credit cards canceled. What remains is just a wad of cash and a bicycle that he borrows from Kenny, a kid (presumably in his neighborhood) he has never met before, so he can go to the store to buy alcohol.

Because his AA sponsor, Frank (Michael Pena – Crash, World Trade Center), is a local cop with some clout, Nick can bypass some city regulations and live in his front yard while deciding what to do next. He becomes acquainted with Samantha (Rebecca Hall – The Town, Transcendence), a younger pregnant woman who has just moved across the street and whose husband is still working on the other side of the country through the transition. Before Nick can come to terms with his situation, he cannot help but interfere with Kenny, Frank, and Samantha’s lives and tell them how they should be living. The fact that he can identify and solve their problems and work through his own (while also apparently detoxing) feels negligent of both human emotion and chemical dependence.

I wanted to like this movie a lot. Ferrell proved he has the range to be taken seriously as a dramatic actor. I would have scoffed at that idea five years ago. He did well with the script. This script itself could have been better written. Dan Rush (in his debut directing performance, did not do a poor job by any means). The problem was that we were supposed to believe that this coming-to-terms story about a recovering alcoholic who loses his career and his wife in a single afternoon could be wrapped up and tied with a bow in five days. We were supposed to believe that this man could form meaningful relationships with people he never met before in just five days and that, despite any struggles that might occur along the way, they would still be his best friends forever. In his free time during this five-day stint, Nick can also connect with an old flame after reading something she wrote him in a senior high school yearbook he finds in one of the boxes in his front yard.

This movie is based on a short story called “Why Don’t You Dance,” written by a man named Raymond Carver. Rush directed a 96-minute film based on a story with just 1600 words. I don’t think those two things translate successfully. It should have been left alone. However, this film could have worked very well had you had the same storyline but done so over a few weeks, a couple of months, half a year, etc. But five days? It’s unrealistic to assume a person can even start to believe that these two life-altering events are happening, let alone go entirely through the seven stages of grief a person must go through when even one of these two events occurs (1. Shock and Denial, 2. Pain and Guilt, 3. Anger and Bargaining 4. Depression, Reflection, and Loneliness 5. The Upward Turn 6. Reconstruction and Working Through 7. Acceptance and Hope – http://www.recover-from-grief.com/7-stages-of-grief.html). The unexpected loss of a job or the sudden separation can often take years to recover. To think that a person can go through all of these stages in five days is an insult to our intelligence. It’s just not realistic and, therefore, unbelievable.

On the other hand, if this movie were to extend over six months, the premise itself would be unrealistic, and therefore, you have another unbelievable situation. To believe that a person could live in their front yard for five days with all their possessions just on display for everybody to come by and see is a bit of a stretch. But for the movie’s sake, we can assume there is some loophole where five days is acceptable. I would hope at this point, either Rush, Ferrell, a writer, or an editor would have said, “We can’t do this movie and hope that people find it realistic.” But either that didn’t happen, or everybody threw their hands in the air as if to say, “We’ve come this far. We can’t go back now,” and decided to make the movie anyway. Either way, they put a terrible, all too familiar situation in front of us and fixed everything with whipped cream, nuts, and a cherry 96 minutes later.

Plot 6/10
Character Development 8/10
Character Chemistry 3/10
Acting 7/10
Screenplay 5/10
Directing  5/10
Cinematography 6/10
Sound 5/10
Hook and Reel 8/10
Universal Relevance 8/10
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