They say that rock stars all want to be movie stars, and vice versa. There’s a sort of inevitable desire of people with a niche success to prove that they aren’t defined by their expertise – that they could have been just as successful in any number of other endeavors. This insecurity is responsible for a lot of bad movies and Billy Bob Thornton records.
In a similar vein, indie movie producers are always chasing studio levels of success and movie studios are always looking to get some indie cred. In both cases, I humbly suggest that there are some very strong reasons to consider staying in your lane.
‘Everything Must Go’ is based on an itty-bitty story from Raymond Carver’s ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.’ There’s not much in the original story to hang a movie on, so the filmmakers had a very free hand. They chose to exercise this freedom in cliche ways, unfortunately. We get a precocious chubby black kid (played pretty well by Biggie Small’s son) who teaches our lost hero about love and second chances. We also get a superfluous romantic double-cross thrown in for good measure.
In short, Will’s character has lost his job and his wife on the same day. Then he loses the keys to his house and the company car that contains the wallet with all his money and ID. Since his wife has done him the service of putting all his possessions on the lawn, he sets up shop there and starts trying to beer himself to death in his La-Z-Boy.
His descent is interrupted by the aforementioned precocious fat kid, the cop who sponsors him in AA and a pretty neighbor who moves in across the street.
There are moments, to be sure. There aren’t many, but sometimes moments are all you get.
There is a nice chemistry between Will and the kid, and some of the conversations with the pretty neighbor belong in a better movie.
In the end, I think this movie is what happens when people who care about Box Office returns try to make a Hal Hartley movie. The filmmakers want to be clever indie kids, but they don’t trust us enough to veer far from formula. One gets the impression that casting Will in a movie without jokes was as much risk as the financiers could tolerate.
