Stiller beyond compare in male midlife-crisis comedy
The writer, director and actor Mike White has a knack for telling stories about the chasm between what people really want and who they really are. His sweet-and-sour satires are minefields of personal disappointment, bitterness and despair, littered with the wreckage of broken promises and unmet expectations.
The characters who populate them, from the animal-loving loner played by Molly Shannon in “Year of the Dog” to Laura Dern's post-rehab whistle-blower on the HBO series “Enlightened,” are typically dismissed as society's weirdos and losers.
Brad Sloan (Ben Stiller), the middle-age family man in White's wonderful new comedy, “Brad's Status,” is neither a weirdo nor a loser by any stretch of the imagination. He runs a small nonprofit and enjoys a pleasant middle-class existence with his loving wife, Melanie (Jenna Fischer), and their smart, collegebound son, Troy (Austin Abrams).
But Brad also worries intently about money and the future, and deep down he is troubled by what he suspects is his own mediocrity. He is reminded of this whenever he hears news of his four closest college buddies, who have all gone on to far greater material success than he has.
His old pal Billy (Jemaine Clement) is now a tech titan enjoying an early retirement on a Maui beach, while Craig (Michael Sheen, deliciously smug) has become an in-demand political pundit and bestselling author. Jason (Luke Wilson) is a major Wall Street player with his own private jet. And White himself pops up briefly, and with tongue firmly in cheek, as Nick, an in-demand Hollywood director with a beach house that was recently featured in the pages of Architectural Digest.
We are, in short, firmly in the realm of the male midlife-crisis comedy, a subgenre with its own long, proud tradition of mediocrity. But White has spun a funny, empathetic and surprisingly grounded comedy that itself defies obvious comparisons.
He is aided by one of Stiller's richest performances in years, one that fits nicely alongside the men the actor has played in recent films such as “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” “While We're Young” and the forthcoming “The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected).” Once a fixture of outrageous mainstream comedy (“Meet the Parents,” “Zoolander”), the actor has become an all-tooplausible avatar of middleage discontent. He embodies everyday normalcy with extraordinary ease.
Brad's weakness for comparing himself with others isn't limited to his friends. On a college-scouting trip with Troy, Brad realizes that his son has an excellent shot at getting into Harvard, and Stiller plays out his reaction in all sorts of marvelously complex notes: a rush of pride at Troy's accomplishments, a flush of shame at having underestimated him and a faint tinge of resentment that his own child might soon eclipse him. But rather than milking the father-son relationship for easy conflict or cheap laughs, “Brad's Status” gives them all sorts of realistically thorny and affectionate scenes to play.
It's no spoiler to point out that the movie concludes on an unresolved, discordant note. To reward Brad with a tidy ending, after all, would only indulge his sense of himself as the center of the universe. Fittingly enough, it's Troy — very appealingly played by Abrams as a young genius and an absent-minded teenager rolled into one — who ultimately pulls Brad back to reality. He leaves us with the lovely realization that the solution to Brad's problem, the proof that he's always been meant for extraordinary things, has been under his nose all along.