BRAD’S NEW FILM REVEALS STATUS REALLY IS THE PITS
Brad’s Status (15A) Verdict: Amusing and thought-provoking ★★★☆☆
BRAD PITT is one of the producers of this gently engaging film, which offers an amusing footnote, since it’s about a guy called Brad (played by Ben Stiller) in the throes of a mid-life crisis.
But this Brad, unlike that Brad, is conspicuously less successful than his old school friends, all of whom appear to have won the lottery of life.
He is neurotically preoccupied with the trappings of status, and his own lack of them. At the airport, his ‘silver flyer’ card is not enough to get him priority boarding. When, he wonders, was the last time the smuggest of his old pals (played by Michael Sheen) flew economy?
All his materialistic grumbles froth into proper existential angst when he takes his teenage son Troy (Austin Abrams) to look at Harvard University, and broods on how things have turned out for him since his own student days.
Back home in Sacramento he has a lovely wife (Jenna Fischer), and together they have raised a goodnatured child, bright enough to be Harvard material, but Brad is more likely to count his neighbour’s cars than his own blessings.
A glum voiceover, lots of plaintive violin music and occasional what-might-have-been fantasies, emphasise how belittled he feels by the bigger achievements of his own contemporaries.
In the league table of success, he considers himself relegation fodder.
Stiller plays this kind of selfabsorbed malcontent, not a million miles from his recent Walter Mitty, very nicely.
And writer-director Mike White has ventured ably into what was once considered, more or less exclusively, Woody Allen territory.
I saw Brad’s Status with my 24-yearold daughter, who quite liked it, but didn’t really get it.
It’s a film for middle-aged people, and if you’re one of them, I think it will make you smile and maybe even reflect on what really counts as success.