Everything Must Go
If I'm being honest, I have to admit that I pretty much have no use for Will Ferrell. I can handle him in small doses.... or rather the characters he typically portrays. Man child after shrieking man child on parade. I've only really liked him in a couple of movies: Anchorman and Stranger Than Fiction. The best I can offer after that was that he was ok in Melinda and Melinda and Wedding Crashers. Anything else? No thanks. And that includes most of his work on Saturday Night Live. (I should mention though that I haven't seen Elf and Old School- two movies that many of my friends thoroughly enjoyed). So, going into Everything Must Go, I was kind of geared up to hate it, but I did reserve a little room to actually enjoy it because by all accounts, Ferrell was playing against type in a movie that was only vaguely comedic; at the very least that was an interesting angle. I still thought I wasn't going to like it though. And the verdict? Not bad really. And the verdict on Ferrell? Somewhere between damn solid and straight up awesome... much to my surprise. Turns out, he can act...like a grown up... like a desperate grown up at that. And it's pretty cool to see. And what else is pretty cool? Limited Ferrell nudity. Nice.
So what, besides playing someone his own age- physically AND emotionally- made it different for Ferrell. For starters, a world of subtlety. He acted more with looks and tone than with what he was saying and doing. Again, this would seem to be a departure for Ferrell- a master of over-the-top physical/raunchy comedy. Turns out Ferrell has some soul, and here he isn't afraid to share it with you. It turned out to be the perfect casting in this role if for no other reason than it was so unexpected. Who'd have thought he could have pulled off the tole of Nick Halsey, the down-on-his-luck alcoholic whose life spirals into a seemingly endless series of basements over the course of 5 or so days. He loses his job. His wife leaves him. She tosses all his stuff onto the lawn and locks him out of the house- forcing him to live on the lawn.. under the auspices that he is holding a yard sale. He relapses into the vast pit of alcoholism he has desperately tried to climb out of. And so on and so forth. Every time you think he's finally ascending out of the basement, the stairs get pulled out from him and he's hitting rock bottom once more. What's interesting here is how Ferrell makes you FEEL his desperation. The vacant stares. The overwhelming listlessness he brings to Nick. It's like you can see the dark rain cloud hanging over his head. And through it all Ferrell barely breaks a sweat. Perhaps his true genius is how he he somehow makes his character kind of despicable but simultaneously easy to relate to. It's no small feat.
Too bad that his cast mates struggle to keep pace. Rebecca Hall does a decent job at turning on the charm as Nick's newly arrived neighbor. Laura Dern playing one of Nick's long lost high school classmates is probably best able to match Ferrell's performance, but she's really only in the movie for a glance or two. C.J. Wallace (Biggie Smalls' kid) as Nick's young friend is clearly learning how to be an actor at this point. And Michael Pena just falls flat as Nick's homicide detective AA sponsor. On the whole, the cast wasn't bad, but the just didn't seem as inspired as Will Ferrell. Which seems so damn odd to write.
Also lacking inspiration was the movie's pacing. Perhaps it was meant to draw more attention to Nick's slow decline to the bottom, but the movie trudged on so... damn... slowly... that at points it was actually boring. And that is a cardinal sin for a movie. Watching Ferrell play against type was cool and all, but let's get this thing rolling... and it never did take off until the very end of the movie... which is a shame because the story is actually pretty cool at its core. Kind of makes you wonder what you would do if you just kept hitting rock bottom... and unfortunately, the movie gives you plenty of time to think this out. At least until the end. I really liked how they tied the story up. Really cool. And while it kind of took it in the direction I thought it would, it got there in such a way as to make the ending work. All good stuff indeed.
In the end, I guess I have to question whether Ferrell really was that good. Did he really elevate the movie as much as I think he did, or was I just so surprised to see any glimmer of talent and true acting that I am wildly overrating the movie. Is this his Bill Murray in Lost in Translation moment? My gut says it is. And for now that's going to have to be good enough... if only it weren't so darn slow...
Grade: B+
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