Available on DVD: “Everything Must Go”

Will Ferell and Christopher Jordan Wallace in Everything Must Go

Everything Must Go is the story of a middle-class man hitting bottom, for reasons that are both as obvious as the empty beer cans that pile up around him and as elusive as the never-seen wife who has just walked out of his life. In a single day the man, a mid-level Arizona sales executive named Nick Halsey (Will Ferrell), loses his job and returns home to find that the locks on his house have been changed, his bank account frozen and all his stuff piled in the front yard.

This sad, surreal spectacle of domesticity turned literally inside out — lamps sitting in the sunlight, a recliner where a lawn chair should be — is what links Everything Must Go to its source, a short story by Raymond Carver called Why Don’t You Dance? The story, like so many of Carver’s, is a jagged shard of painful absurdity, a glimpse of the human condition that the film, written and directed by Dan Rush, expands into a picture window. From a few pages of oblique dialogue and terse prose, Rush extrapolates a narrative that is less jarring and more familiar than anything in Carver, but nonetheless true to the writer’s tough, compassionate and intimately knowing apprehension of masculine defeat.

Ferrell turns out to be an almost perfect embodiment of this theme. He is large, a little ungainly and charismatic without quite being handsome, and somehow able to seem at once exquisitely self-conscious and utterly obtuse. There is no shortage of overgrown man-boys in American movies right now, but none that so aptly embody John Updike’s definition of a grown man as "a failed boy."

And a failed man has to choose between wounded, stoical dignity and regressive self-pity. Nick, settling into his uneasy chair and trying to sustain an illusion of normalcy in full view of the neighbors, tries to split the difference. His spiritual crisis presents itself as a series of practical problems: how to disable the sprinklers that douse him awake every morning; where to shower; what to do with his life.

In Why Don’t You Dance? the nameless Nick Halsey figure is visited by a young couple. The encounter’s unsettling effect on them is what turns the story into something more than an anecdote, and it lodges in the reader’s memory because so much is left out. Rush’s decision to fill in the blanks is perfectly reasonable — otherwise he would have made a three-minute movie instead of a feature — and also risky. The more you know about Nick, the less haunting his situation is likely to be, and as Rush traces his life forward and back, Everything Must Go tiptoes toward obviousness and sentimentality.

Happily, though, it never quite reaches those destinations and thus avoids the fate of Jindabyne, Ray Lawrence’s frustratingly uneven adaptation of So Much Water So Close to Home, one of Carver’s best stories. Carver’s characters are islands, and their kind of isolation is precisely what the sociable medium of narrative cinema tends to resist. Robert Altman elegantly solved this problem by stringing together a small Carver anthology in Short Cuts. Rush employs the more conventional method of supplying Nick with a past and some company.

He strikes up an acquaintance with Samantha (Rebecca Hall), who has just moved in across the street, and with a boy named Kenny (Christopher Jordan Wallace), whose mother works in the neighborhood. Nick also spends some time with a local detective (Michael Peña) who is also his A.A. sponsor, and with a high school classmate (Laura Dern) whom he looks up after perusing one of his old yearbooks.

Their encounter provides a slightly too explicit reminder that, for all his wretchedness and misbehavior, Nick is, deep down, a decent guy. The tricky task facing Rush and Ferrell is to make that notion credible without blundering into clichés of easy redemption. Unlike its beer-soaked protagonist, Everything Must Go remains dry, serving up its catharsis in wry, moderate doses and making the most of its modest, careful virtues. It is a sober movie, but also sad and satisfying.