To be honest, I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with actor Ben Stiller. There are certain films of his I've enjoyed: Reality Bites, There's Something About Mary, Zoolander, The Royal Tenenbaums; but, for seemingly every one I've liked there's at least three I hated with a fiery passion.
The last one I really liked was probably Greenberg, and that had a lot more to do with the supporting cast (which included Greta Gerwig, Brie Larson and Juno Temple, all of whom I love) than Stiller himself, who was a bit of a loser in it. I mean, granted, that was the character he was hired to play, but it's also one he's done on more than a few occasions, so it's gotten a bit old over the years.
When Brad's Status begins, it seems like it is going to be more of the same: Stiller plays Brad Sloan, who runs a non-profit and has a comfortable, middle-of-the-road existence with his wife, Melanie (Jenna Fischer, The Office) and son, Troy (Austin Abrams, The Walking Dead, Paper Towns), who is gearing up for college.
Despite this, Brad is suffering a bit of a mid-life crisis, in particular focusing on what he sees as the more accomplished success of his former friends, who he rarely interacts with anymore, and all seem to be living the high-life.
Brad is particularly wounded by the fact that he wasn't invited to the wedding of one of said friends, given how close they used to be, and spends a considerable amount of time lamenting the state of his life and how much better his old friends have it than him, especially as viewed through the prism of social media. (Yep, that officially makes this the second film I've seen in a week revolving around social media, along with Ingrid Goes West.)
At first, I wasn't too onboard with the film- for one thing, it indulges heavily in one of my biggest movie pet peeves: narration. Granted, when done right, it can be essential- witness A Clockwork Orange or Trainspotting, where it was helpful in figuring out what the hell was going on, given the oft-hard-to-understand dialects being used. (Granted, the one used in the former was invented and the latter was simply a thick Scottish brogue that only sounded made up, lol.)
But more often than not, it's a narrative crutch, inserted because the filmmaker didn't do their job of the cardinal rule of "show, don't tell." Put another way, if I wanted to be read to, I'd listen to an audio book, you know? Save the spiels for the characters to say within the film, not spew out in incessant, rambling monologues.
However, around about thirty minutes or so into the film, something happens that makes one realize that the approach is a necessary evil in this particular instance. Brad takes his son on a road trip to Boston to tour the local colleges, including Harvard, which, much to his shock, Troy has a solid chance of getting into. While Brad was busy navel-gazing, his son, you see, has been growing up.
This startles Brad into realizing he hasn't been paying attention to Troy the way he should, but also that his son has a chance at a "real" future, to carry on his legacy in a way that Brad himself was never quite able to achieve, in his eyes.
This all changes when Brad decides to take up a friend of Troy's on her offer to meet up at a local bar. Ananya (Shazi Raza, TV's Salvation, in what should be a star-making turn) is a classical music major that goes to Harvard and is politically active and razor-sharp in her observations. When Brad attempts to spill his sob story to her, Ananya isn't having it, and pulls a verbal Moonstruck on him, as in "Snap out of it!"
Pointing out all that he has going for him, Ananya helps to draw him out of his self-induced spell and make him realize he should be grateful for what he has, not what he doesn't. So much for Millennials being too self-involved to care about anyone else! (Which many people are learning simply isn't the case IRL as well, as evidenced by the tragedy in Florida and the impending fall-out of teens doing the job adults SHOULD be doing.)
At this point, I should point out that the film is written and directed by Mike White, best-known for writing School of Rock, Orange County and The Good Girl, but also the lesser-known, great cult flick Chuck & Buck and for creating the underrated HBO series Enlightened. With nearly anyone else at the helm, this all could have gone disastrously wrong, but lucky for you viewers, it doesn't.
You see, White knew that, for this film to work, it had to have a very specific tone, and remarkably, he does indeed achieve it, even if it takes a hot minute to realize it. At first, I can see a lot of people who, like me, are near-bored to tears by yet another gloomy, self-involved opus starring Ben Stiller.
But the film cleverly uses Stiller's long-established, best-known public persona as a way into the story White has to tell, which is actually about learning to be thankful for what you have, not envious of what you don't. It sounds pat on paper, but trust me, it works in the end, especially as you begin to see, as does Brad, that his old friends don't have it as good as he imagined, and that his life may not be as bad as he previously thought.
As we discussed with my recent review of Ingrid Goes West, you can't always believe what you see or read on social media, and I'm not just talking about "fake news," but the things that people post that make it seem like their lives is a never-ending party. They could be, like Ingrid's Taylor - coincidentally, another "Sloan" herself, BTW- a "social influencer" paid to plug stuff and seem like she's having fun non-stop.
Or they could be, like Brad's friends, putting up a facade of the perfect life, when, in fact, their lives are a shambles, or, at the very least, not what they're cracked up to be on the surface. If Ingrid is the Millennial take on things, then Brad's Status is the older, if not necessarily wiser, version of the story.
As I myself am smack dab in the middle of both- Millennial by the skin of my teeth, maybe, but more Gen X in my line of thinking (I was a teen/twenty-something in the 90's) and not quite middle age...yet (he says ominously)- then I can certainly relate to some of this. I'm not married with a kid as of yet, but I'm certainly old enough to have done so. But I know a thing or two about envying others, to be sure.
So does Mike White, who has made a career out of wry observations about just that sort of thing, as you can tell from his aforementioned resume. What makes this film work as well as it does is undeniably the interplay between Stiller and the younger cast, especially Abrams and Raza, and how White contrasts it with Stiller's interactions with the older cast, which also includes Michael Sheen, Luke Wilson and the undervalued Jemaine Clement (Flight of the Conchords).
So, while it takes a while to get going, and the tone may not work for some, for those who stick with it, the pay-off is pretty considerable, and I must admit, I thought about it long after seeing it- not always a given with movies these days. As you might have guessed, it would make for a good pairing with Ingrid Goes West, though perhaps if you're only a certain age, like myself, stuck in the middle of two generations- Generation Y, indeed.
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