“Everything Must Go” is cinematic pointilism. The big picture is famil iar — busted middle-age man, suburban alcoholic despair — yet the details are so finely rendered that the overall impression is potently strange.
Returning home from work after being fired as a salesman in Arizona, Nick Halsey (Will Ferrell) finds his wife gone, the locks changed and his possessions splattered across the front lawn. His ATM and credit cards don’t work. So he sits in the lounge-turned-lawn chair, pops himself a beer or 20, and broods.
Looking bleary and remote, Will Ferrell draws a deep breath and takes a big step forward as a dramatic actor in a sharply funny adaptation of Raymond Carver’s short story “Why Don’t You Dance,” greatly expanded by first-time writer director Dan Rush with nuance and sensitivity. The standard Hollywood riff on the suburbs — that their sterility masks their depravity — becomes more of a minor-key melody here.
Ferrell and Rush aren’t driven by contempt or scorn, and they balance the everyday against the absurd almost as wonderfully as the other notable Carver-inspired movie, “Short Cuts.” Kenny, a neighborhood kid (an excellent Christopher Jordan Wallace, son of the late Biggie Smalls), circles endlessly, more out of boredom than to be a pest. Facing arrest, though, Nick gets a reprieve from a detective who tells him he can stay at home for up to five days provided he has a lawn sale. So Nick hires the kid to help sell.
The movie consistently swerves around expectation. There’s a pretty new neighbor, Samantha (Rebecca Hall), but she’s married and pregnant, so there is no question of her being Nick’s saving angel.
Mostly the movie passes in whispers as Nick tries to clean up his life. It’s easy to picture, say, Tim Robbins playing the character as a maximum oaf, but Nick’s acute lack of sentimentality slowly emerges. If he weren’t so honest with himself, he wouldn’t need to drink. When Samantha tells him his father sounds like an interesting guy, he replies, “Yeah, he was more of a drunk.” Weary despair does not prevent him from instantly sizing up what’s wrong with Samantha’s marriage.
The idea of commerce as a purgatory of the lost dates back at least to Willy Loman, but in a refreshing twist, selling helps restore Nick. The lawn sale creates a community, brings judgmental neighbors out from behind their curtains, inspires random kindness. As de Tocqueville wrote, “Trade loves moderation, delights in compromise, and is most careful to avoid anger.” Consider this film a smart delayed response to Arthur Miller: It’s “Rebirth of a Salesman.”