Stiller shines as a worried father
Brad’s Status Where: Cineplex Odeon Victoria Starring: Ben Stiller, Austin Abrams, Jenna Fischer Directed by: Mike White Parental advisory: PG
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 whistleblower on the HBO series Enlightened, are typically dismissed as weirdos and losers.
Brad Sloan (Ben Stiller), the middle-aged family man in White’s wonderful new comedy, Brad’s Status, is neither a weirdo nor a loser. He runs a small nonprofit based in Sacramento and enjoys a pleasant middle-class existence with his loving wife, Melanie (Jenna Fischer), and their smart, college-bound son, Troy (Austin Abrams). But Brad 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 a private jet. 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.
In one of the movie’s wittiest touches, we first glimpse these characters not as they really are but, rather, as dreamlike projections of Brad’s jealousy. The camera, drifting about like an inebriated bumblebee, alights on these men of power and privilege, watching them strut through their enviably perfect lives, accompanied by Brad’s sulky voiceover and — adding hilarious insult to injury — the drooping, dithering violins of Mark Mothersbaugh’s score.
We are firmly in the realm of the male midlife-crisis comedy, a subgenre with its own long, proud tradition of mediocrity. But White seems well aware of the potential pitfalls, and he avoids them with a self-awareness that his protagonist could use more of. Starting from a single key insight into human behaviour — the natural compulsion to compare oneself with others — 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, whether as a much-abused straight man in Meet the Parents or a boisterous object of ridicule in Zoolander, the actor has become an all-too-plausible avatar of middle-aged discontentment. He embodies everyday normalcy with extraordinary ease.
The slender story is set in motion when Brad and Troy head to Boston on a college-scouting trip, with both Harvard and Tufts on the agenda. There’s a cringemaking beauty of a scene in which 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.
In other words, Brad’s weakness for comparing himself with others isn’t limited to his friends.
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 centre of the universe.