No center holds for long in the head of Brad Sloan (Ben Stiller), a comfortably-off fellow who runs a non-profit in Sacramento, where his loving wife (Jenna Fischer) works for the Government. Though it's less a departure from the mold than a meander home, Brad's Status offers usefully excruciating insights into the wild swings between hubris and self-laceration that fuel our daily efforts to solidify a coherent self.
UNBOUND COLLEGE REVIEW MOVIE
Maybe so, but a Mike White movie rarely goes where you think it's going, even if it slots into place by the finish. "First-world problems," I heard someone mutter coming out of a critics' screening of Brad's Status, a dramedy written and directed by White about a middle-aged, middle-income family man freaking out while on a college tour with his teenaged son. Should we smell a rat when such tales are peddled by men whose bling exceeds all our blah prospects put together? Maybe, but when Mike White weighs in, it's worth following along with the nervously inventive mind that brought wonderfully skewed angles to bear on the lives of disgruntled plebs in movies from The Good Girl to Chuck & Buck to the recent Beatriz at Dinner. At the climax other, mostly female, not-rich salts of the earth swoop in to persuade him that, OMG, it's a wonderful life just as it is. He eats himself alive over this at self-defeating length that's both funny and sad. It's an oft-told tale, in Hollywood: A good man wracked by his envy of others he deems more successful than he at scoring the usual American-Dream jackpots of money, status, and fame. Please Clap: Troy (Austin Abrams) and father Brad (Ben Stiller) in Brad's Status.