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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
EVERYTHING MUST GO Will Ferrell is not unconvincing as your average dude. In fact, the man who once did George W. Bush better than W. himself pretty much nails it as Nick, a mid-level executive at a nondescript company with a medium-sized house and manicured lawn in a familiar enough Arizona neighborhood. Nick’s glory days as a high school baseball player, his time partying in college, and his honeymoon in Japan might as well be ancient history. Mundane real life has caught up with him, leaving Nick with an unhappy childless marriage and an alcohol addiction. When Nick’s drinking gets him into yet another tangle while on a business trip to Denver, he’s fired and returns home early, Pabst Blue Ribbon tall boy in hand, to find his wife has finally kicked him out—literally. All of Nick’s stuff has been dumped on the front lawn, and the locks have been changed. When Nick’s company car is repossessed, the family cell phone plan cancelled, and joint checking accounts frozen, he’s left with little else to do but sit on his La-Z-Boy on the front lawn and slug back beers, until a neighborhood kid finally lights a fire under him. The slight problem with casting Ferrell is that while he’s been playing the guy next door for years, he’s been doing it as a gag. Seeing Will Ferrell in a dramatic role is like seeing him in a straightjacket. He’s very skilled and surprisingly disciplined, as an actor, but I for one find it almost disconcerting when he doesn’t swing for the fences at every comic opportunity. Though he adds some mileage to an otherwise quite average character, it really becomes a film about Will Ferrell trying not to be funny. Basing his screenplay on a Raymond Carver short story, director Dan Rush misses some things, though this setup is so ripe with potential. Rush puts us face to face with a guy who’s been cut off completely from suburbia. No cell, no car, no credit. The only piece of the suburban-consumerist pie he has left is the proverbial front lawn. But Rush blows it, completely unaware of how truly meaningful it is to be stripped of these material things we as an audience so take for granted. Nick quickly finds workarounds, and by the second act, the rote story takes center stage. The fact that Nick is actually living on his lawn is almost superfluous. What a missed opportunity, and in socially regressive Arizona no less—the Stepford State, as a recent transplant friend of mine calls it, for its lopsided attention to cosmetic materialism. Rereading the story, “Why Don’t You Dance?,” I’m amazed a film this far removed from the spirit of its source material can still claim to be an adaptation. Carver was one of the sharpest purveyors of irony, and it’s with irony that Rush could have a shaped a real gem of a film. Carver’s vibe is invoked once when Nick upsets his new neighbor, Samantha (Rebecca Hall), belligerently describing to her how pathetic and average her life is. It’s a scene the writer would have been proud of, yet it’s one of the few. Instead, too much time is spent on clichés, like the developing friendship between Nick and Kenny (newcomer Christopher Jordan Wallace), the kid who eventually gives some needed life perspective by stating the film’s obvious themes with childlike innocence. Between
Ferrell’s battle with typecasting, Rush’s missed opportunity to really
explore the pervasive irony of suburbia, and the atrocious plotline
involving the kid, there’s actually a story worth watching in here
somewhere. The one or two redeeming scenes certainly keep it relevant,
and even if Ferrell is unable to crack jokes, he’s still very effective.
I was on board several times when it appeared this would turn into a
more remarkable film, but alas, in the end it’s about as unremarkable as
the bland residential street on which it takes place.
Michael Lee
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