Everything Must Go Movie Review [Rating:7.7/10]
Movie Review by Slate
For a film about one man’s descent into alcoholism and semi-homelessness, Everything Must Go (Roadside Attractions) feels surprisingly jaunty. Perhaps that’s because this wisp of an indie, written and directed by first-time filmmaker Dan Rush from a short story by Raymond Carver, stars Will Ferrell, a comedian who specializes in seeming at once wistful and indestructible. Like Frank the Tank, Ferrell’s hard-partying character in the curiously memorable comedy Old School, this film’s sort-of-hero, Nick Halsey, dimly intuits that he’s responsible for his own unhappiness and that it’s in his power to change. He just needs to sit down and have a couple beers while he thinks the whole thing through.
In the first scene, Nick loses his job as a salesman, thanks to a chronic drinking problem and a nebulous sexual-harassment claim by a colleague. Driving home from work with a flask in his hand, he discovers that his wife has just left him, changed all the locks on their house, and dragged his belongings onto the front lawn. Nick’s response to the sudden obliteration of his entire life is to put off responding: He simply plops down in his favorite recliner, busts out a 12-pack, and spends the night in the yard.
Movie Review by The Wall Street Journal
According to a screenwriting commonplace—a valid one—big, sprawling novels can be rich sources for screenplays (“The Godfather”), while movies adapted from short stories (“The Swimmer”), run the risk of feeling thin. It may seem perverse to mention a film as deservedly obscure as “The Swimmer” in the context of Will Ferrell’s ambitious new vehicle, but extreme examples can be illuminating. In that old Burt Lancaster film, adapted from a John Cheever story, an unhappy suburbanite re-examines his life in the course of swimming home in a succession of neighbor’s pools. It’s nothing but a device, and far from a good one.
Movie Review by CS Monitor
“Everything Must Go,” starring Will Ferrell, is based on a 1981 Raymond Carver short story called “Why Don’t You Dance?” about a man who, for unclear reasons, has strewn his worldly possessions onto his lawn. His life, or at least its material contents, becomes a kind of cosmic yard sale.
Carver’s metaphor is all too real in these recessionary times and serves as a springboard for first-time writer-director Dan Rush’s film. By fleshing out the story, Rush loses Carver’s eerie suggestiveness, the sense of violence percolating beneath the humdrum. Rush’s literalmindedness about the woes of Ferrell’s Nick Halsey – his wife threw him out, changed the locks, and canceled his credit cards – in some ways feels closer to John Cheever than to Carver. Still, the picture of Nick, beyond zonked, surveying the sum total of his belongings, hits home. It’s powerfully sad.
Add a Comment
| Print article |
