Return to tiff.’s home page

Everything Must Go

Everything Must Go

Dan Rush

  • Country: USA
  • Year: 2010
  • Language: English
  • Producer: Marty Bowen, Wyck Godfrey
  • Executive Producer: Scott Lumpkin, Celine Rattray, Martin Bowen, Bill Hallman, Marc Erlbaum, J. Andrew Greenblatt
  • Screenplay: Dan Rush
  • Runtime: 96
  • Programmes:

After 16 years devising motivational speeches that promise certain success, Nick Porter (Will Ferrell) is abruptly fired. He returns home to discover his wife has left him, changed the locks on their home and dumped all his possessions on the front yard. Nick puts it all on the line – or, more properly, on the lawn – with an absurdly escalating garage sale that becomes a unique strategy for survival. Nick comes face-to-face with a life turned inside out and discovers in total exposure an unexpected path to renewal.

Addiction & Drugs,  Alienation,  Drama,  Family Relations,  First Time Feature,  Adaptation,  Mental Health

screening times

    • Friday September 10
    • 6:30:00 PM
    • ISABEL BADER THEATRE
    • Monday September 13
    • 4:30:00 PM
    • WINTER GARDEN THEATRE

Note: indicates Premium Screening.

official description

Everything Must Go – at once a sales pitch and a surrender to fate – is a perfectly apt title for this melancholic yet entertaining film that dismantles the structures, behaviours and relationships we have come to consider normal.

Nicolas Halsey (Will Ferrell) is not having a good day. Not only has he been fired from his sales-manager job of sixteen years, but he returns home to find the locks changed and his belongings strewn outside, the spoils of his failed marriage scattered across the lawn for all the world to see.

So starts Everything Must Go, a wryly humorous drama starring Ferrell, which examines five endless days in the life of a man who believes he has lost everything. Deciding to both fight and give up, Nick appropriates the object-laden lawn as his living room; he stations himself in a recliner and entertains himself with neighbour-watching, while steadily chipping away at his six-month sobriety. When the police show up to shut down the illicit spectacle, he invokes a legal loophole that buys him four more days of lawn-time: residents of Plano, Texas are permitted to hold private yard sales for a maximum of five consecutive days.

That first-time screenwriter and director Dan Rush succeeds in crafting a feature-length film from Raymond Carver’s understated prose (the script is an adaptation of his short story “Why Don’t You Dance?”) is a testament both to the evocative power of Carver’s minimalism and to the imaginative expertise of Rush. The story represents only a short span of time and space, yet it is consistently engaging, tracking Nick’s schizophrenic oscillations of grief, sorrow, hope and liberated inebriation as he befriends a lonely teenager, offers unsolicited advice to his new, pregnant neighbour (Rebecca Hall) and comes to terms with saying goodbye to a life he is unlikely to reclaim.

Ferrell’s nuanced portrayal of Nick elicits gut-wrenching empathy one moment, disappointed repugnance the next. He wears his pain visibly – but never melodramatically – even as he fights through it with deadpan humour and self-deprecation.

Jane Schoettle

director bio

Dan Rush was born and raised in San Diego, California and graduated from Dartmouth College as a Fine Arts major studying printmaking and photography. An accomplished music video director, he made commercials for such companies as Sony, Major League Baseball, Dell Computers, Bell Atlantic and Discovery Networks before working in feature film development at Tristar Pictures. Everything Must Go (10) is his feature film debut.

full credits

Principal Cast: Will Ferrell, Rebecca Hall, Michael Pena, Christopher C.J. Wallace, Glenn Howerton, Stephen Root, Laura Dern
Producer: Marty Bowen, Wyck Godfrey
Executive Producer: Scott Lumpkin, Celine Rattray, Martin Bowen, Bill Hallman, Marc Erlbaum, J. Andrew Greenblatt
Cinematographer: Michael Barrett
Editor: Sandra Adair
Sound: Michael "Koffy" Koff
Music: David Torn
Production Designer: Kara Lindstrom

Canadian Distributor: Maple  
International Sales Agent: IM Global
Production Company: Temple Hill Productions
.
Shopping Cart
 

    Share This

    • Digg
    • Share

    Like This

    film stills and media

     
    Pause Slideshow