Not even Stiller’s tragicomic touch can quite make this movie memorable
Dir Mike White
Starring Ben Stiller, Austin Abrams, Jenna Fischer, Michael Sheen, Shazi Raja, Luisa Lee, Jemaine Clement, Luke Wilson
Just as nobody sets out to make a three-star film, nobody dreams of leading a three-star life. But Brad Sloan (Ben Stiller) feels stranded by fate in the middle of the league. A securely married founder of a small charitable trust, whose bright teenage son Troy (Austin Abrams) seems destined for the Ivy League, he’s still pricked by pangs of discontentment. Why isn’t his money stretching further, his social life whirling faster, his midlife prospects brighter? And why have his best friends – a suave political pundit (Michael Sheen) and a high-rolling hedge fund manager (Luke Wilson) – ended up doing so much better than him?
Mike White’s low-key comic drama charts Brad’s search for the answers – which, you may not be stunned to hear, more or less amount to “stop being an ungrateful chump, the grass is more than green enough”. Enlightenment dawns when he and Troy go on a tour of prospective colleges, and Brad finds himself longing for the kind of onepercenter leverage that would make an offer of a place for his boy at, say, Harvard a foregone conclusion. Brad doesn’t decry the rigged system, he just regrets he isn’t rigging it himself.
Your patience for watching him work through all this with his mortified son in the blast radius will depend on just how seriously you think the film takes his plight. It’s easy to imagine a version of White’s script that played the premise as an extended joke at Brad’s expense, but it’s not clear that this one is aware its lead character is quite such a nincompoop. Instead, White unambiguously lines up his film with Brad’s point of view: there’s an overwritten first-person voice-over, silly wish-fulfilment dream sequences, and a pretty woman on hand – Harvard student Ananya, charismatically played by newcomer Shazi Raja – to patiently reassure him things aren’t as bad as all that. (The female characters seem almost wilfully underwritten, and only exist to give Brad a prod.)
It is theoretically possible that all of the above is meant to be taken as archly tongue-in-cheek. But when Brad listens to Ananya playing Dvořák’s Humoresque No7 on the violin with the tearfully transported look of an audience member at the premiere of Stravinsky’s The Firebird, it’s tempting to conclude the film just has no taste.
Yet Stiller seems to be working with a smarter, subtler script than the one everyone else is working from. The actor doesn’t quite recapture the hangdog majesty of his performance in Noah Baumbach’s terrific The Meyerowitz Stories, but he unpacks Brad’s destructive mindset with thoughtfulness and a skilful tragicomic touch. The film passes the time with breezy good cheer and the odd well-wrangled cringe, but fades from memory in much the same way. There’s just nothing about this guy that gives you cause to remember him.