Brad’s Status is a morose, shrewd, oddly weepy midlife comedy by writer-director Mike White, all about that least glamorous of the seven deadly sins: envy. It is an introspective and downbeat film, but forceful and personal, with excruciating and all-too-real moments of mortification. And it can be weirdly moving, almost out of nowhere.
Ben Stiller is the only possible casting in the role of Brad, a middle-aged professional guy who has been reasonably happy with his modest life until now, when he suddenly wakes up in his late 40s to the fact that every one of his college contemporaries is a huge success, basking in wealth and fame. He is overwhelmed with poisonous jealousy, imagining their cartoonishly privileged existence, and he hates himself for feeling this way.
This nauseous, existential lurch coincides with having to take his son, Troy (a gentle, sympathetic performance by Austin Abrams), on a tour of colleges for admission interviews. Troy looks likely to get into Harvard, a better school than Brad ever managed, and he must confront the awful possibility that he also feels envious of his son. It’s an “envy-anxiety” role that isn’t far from Stiller’s parts in Noah Baumbach films such as Greenberg, While We’re Young or The Meyerowitz Stories. Maybe something in Stiller’s face does suppressed jealousy well. It’s his mature Blue Steel of menopausal resentment.
