I know, I know. “Brad’s Status”? Don’t be put off by the banal title; School of Rock screenwriter Mike White’s introspective cringe comedy drily harnesses the baby-boomer anxieties experienced by parents of millennials. Ben Stiller is Brad, a fortysomething father who takes his teenage son Troy (Austin Abrams) to the east coast to visit colleges. Voiceover can be off-putting as a narrative device (I often find it too lazily expositional), but here it works well, expressing Brad’s increasingly paranoid internal bon mots about his more successful college friends, such as Michael Sheen’s glamorous political commentator or Luke Wilson’s wealthy family man. “It wasn’t friendship that bonded them,” he declares bitterly. “It was their perceived level of success.”
Brad’s status is that of midlife crisis and extreme self-loathing, or as one character describes it, “white privilege, male privilege, first-class problems”. White has empathy for Brad’s first-world problems, and his genuine fear of growing old without achieving his ambitions. The film is not perfect – Troy, wife Melanie (Jenna Fischer from the US version of The Office) and Brad’s college friends are thin sketches rather than fleshed-out characters, but Stiller is as charming and convincing as he’s ever been – much softer here (though just as neurotic), as he was in Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg.
