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by Sandra Olmsted

In Brad’s Status, director Mike White delves into the emotional struggles of Brad (Ben Stiller) at the moment of reckoning brought on by taking his son, Troy (Austin Abrams), on a tour of Ivy League colleges. Although clearly Brad and his wife Melanie (Jenna Fischer) have much to be thankful for, Brad sincerely believes his college buddies have fared much better than he has. Stuck somewhere between jealousy and regret, Brad questions his whole life from a glass-half-empty perspective. Even though there are moments of truth, pathos, and humor, Brad’s real status is revealed in near monologue form.

While Brad spent his life creating and heading a nonprofit which helps with other nonprofits, his college buddies have become rich and famous; however, the upper-middle-class Brad and Melanie don’t seem to be hurting for anything. Brad also has to contend with the notion that Troy, a musical prodigy, is more talented and more likely to get into any college, including Harvard, which rejected Brad back in his day. When a snafu jeopardizes Troy’s acceptance at Harvard, Brad calls on his old buddies for help tracking down Craig Fisher (Michael Sheen), a political author and White House adviser who lectures at Harvard, to get Troy another interview. Meanwhile, Troy introduces Brad to Ananya (Shazi Raja), a friend from home who does attend Harvard, and Brad imagines visions of his future in which Troy surpasses his father and distances himself from his dad. When Brad runs into Ananya at a bar and without Troy, she eventually accuses Brad of having “enough” and suffering from “first world problems,” which Brad sets off on yet another evaluation of his life.

Then, Brad calls each of his other old buddies: Jason Hatfield (Luke Wilson), who married money and became a hedge fund star with a private jet and a perfect family, and Billy Wearslter (Jemaine Clement), the computer genius who sold his company for a fortune and lives a “dream life” in a Maui beach house with two young women. Making Brad feel worst, he also learns he and Melanie were not invited to the wedding of buddy and famed filmmaker Nick Pascale (Mike White).

Seemingly to explain why middle-age men buy sports cars, director White gives Stiller his lead to reveal Brad’s mid-life crises in soliloquies spoken in either narration or to other characters who aren’t really listening. To his credit, Stiller mostly makes Brad a sympathetic character whose problems, although certainly “first world,” are not trivial or unimportant. Brad is, however, somewhat ungrateful to his old buddies, who are having their own problems. The resolution reaffirms the idea of a good life during and after middle age although it takes too long to get there.

There is solid acting from the whole cast, especially up-and-coming Abrams. In theaters now, Brad’s Status, an Amazon Studios and Annapurna Pictures release, is rated R for language and runs a bit long at 101 minutes.

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