Today has mostly been spent in bed, feeling ill and talking to my wife in jagged sentences. My wife seems to have gotten a good giggle or two from my impaired speech abilities, so I guess it is all worth it. The nice thing is that there has been no stress or anxiety today, which is a bit of a blessing. I have been getting a bit better at being proactive and responding as quickly as possible to anything that could cause stress. Victory be for me, I should say... other than temporarily praying for the walls to collapse around me so I would be relieved of this headache. Perhaps a little bit of an over exaggeration. Anywho, enough about that and on to today's review, which is a movie called Everything Must Go.
This movie had been pitched to me as a comedic
drama, but really it is a character story that does have some elements of
comedy in it. It is the tale of a man
whose addiction to alcohol has cost him both his job and his marriage in the
same day, and the personal path that these developments send him down. We meet Nick Halsey (Will Ferrell) in a way
that seems to be a very typical narrated introduction, but then turns out to be
a link from the image of the man we see before us to only a few hours earlier
when his life was just about to unravel.
Nick has had a long career with his employer, and in with the good times
there were some bad ones, a long list of issues that arose from his problematic
drinking.
After losing his job, and turning to fermented
drink with wide open arms, he arrives at home to find all of his belongings
laid out on the front lawn and all the locks and security codes have been
changed. He chooses to spend the night
on the furniture on the lawn, drinking of course, when the police are called by
neighbours. As luck would have it for
Nick, his AA sponsor is a police detective who is able to get the fuzz off his
back and finds a loop hole that will allow Nick to keep the items on the lawn
for no longer than five consecutive days as long as it is declared a yard sale.
In this movie we saddle up and ride on a five day
journey with a man who loses everything except for his desire to drink. While everything that has happened to him can
be traced back to that nasty addiction, he clings on to the one thing that he
has left, reaching points of desperation such as begging, and trying to slurp
the last drops of beer from discarded cans lying about his front lawn.
One of the main strengths of this movie is the
actors, who are able not just to own their lines but present themselves as
actual living, breathing members of the world.
We are able to buy into their reality and existence thanks to a great
casting job and terrific performances. Ferrell
does a terrific job, but so does Christopher Jordan Wallace who plays Kenny, a
neighbourhood boy who buddies up with
Halsey. The chemistry between
Ferrell and Wallace is abundant, and it allows us to see a sympathetic and
vulnerable side to Halsey.
The subject matter is quite deep and will hit home
for a lot of people, and it is handled quite well by all involved. It does not delve too deep, but also does not
leave everything at surface level. You
get an understanding of the turmoil and cost that addiction brings with it, and
the impossible nature of the battle for sobriety. One day at a time is the saying for
Alcoholics Anonymous, but Ferrell’s character shows that such thinking is
impossible when one is looking both in the past and lamenting the present. Hope can never come from such perspectives,
and it is only when the focused is shifted to the present with a mind for the
future that things can get better.
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