In Brad’s Status, a 47-year-old man takes his 17-year-old son on a tour of Boston’s colleges. A onetime journalist whose award-winning website went bust during the financial meltdown, Brad Sloan runs a nonprofit in Sacramento that seeks to match donors with other worthy nonprofits. His wife works for the California state government. They have a good, solid life. His wife is contented with her lot; on weekends, they have dinner parties and discuss Terry Gross and NPR with their friends. Meanwhile, Brad is quietly, invisibly miserable.
The double-edged title refers both to Brad’s classic American status anxiety and to the way social and mass media provide us with constant reminders of the wondrous benefits of wealth and fame enjoyed by the rich and famous through status updates. Brad’s standard-issue midlife crisis is exacerbated in a way it never would have been in the 1970s because there was no Facebook back then.
Things have not turned out for Brad as he thought they would. He has ended up a man of the middle, and he is tormented by thoughts of the wild successes of his close circle of college friends—now a bestselling TV pundit, a hedge-fund billionaire, a successful movie director, and a guy who cashed out on his Silicon Valley startup and lives with two women on Maui.
“Be present,” his wife sweetly admonishes him, but he drifts off and imagines their glorious lives based on Instagram and television appearances and magazine articles. The joys of a private plane. The glories of the Hawaiian sand. A red carpet in New York. A beefcake pool party in Beverly Hills.
Status anxiety is a particularly American disease, and one of the great American subjects. Clyde Griffiths becomes Theodore Dreiser’s “American tragedy” because this child of penniless street preachers finds unexpected social and financial success very near his grasp until it is threatened by the pregnancy of his working-class girlfriend—which leads to her death and his execution. “What—what’s the secret?” the desperate Willy Loman asks in Death of a Salesman. Not having enough, not being contented with your lot by comparison with the successes of others—these are the unforgiving aspects of the American dream.
When Brad unburdens himself to a cheerful and accomplished Harvard student who wants to save the world as he once did, she looks at him in exasperated disgust. There are people starving in Delhi, she says. You live a pretty good life, she says. When she accuses him of white privilege, it’s one of the few times the term has ever been used precisely. She’s right, of course. Brad lives what is unquestionably an enviable life. But she’s young yet. She has not known disappointment and how it can curdle.
Brad learns that his fantasies about the glamorous photographed existences of his former friends have made him blind to the darker aspects of their real lives—sick children, alcoholism. Even more painfully, he is forced to confront the darker aspects of his own relationship with his son Troy. Played by a wonderful young actor named Austin Abrams, Troy is a brilliant and kind kid whose poise and good nature suggest Brad’s greatest accomplishment has been as a loving parent. But it’s beginning to strike Brad that Troy may well outstrip him, and he doesn’t like the idea of it one bit.
Ben Stiller plays Brad, and reminds us—as he did in the even more painful and equally remarkable Greenberg in 2010—that he is a fearless actor. It is a sad, soulful, perfect performance. But the star here is writer-director Mike White. He is an unusual cultural voice. He has written works as disparate as the crowd-pleasing School of Rock and the extremely discomfiting Chuck & Buck, about a man-child’s stalkerish obsession with a high-school classmate. Nothing in White’s previous work prepared me for the satirical precision and sharp cultural observation evident in every frame of Brad’s Status. This beautiful, funny, and aching film gets closer to the experience of reading a really good short story than any American movie I’ve ever seen. It’s as if John Cheever and Ann Beattie had a baby—and that baby adapted Andrew Ferguson’s Crazy U for the screen.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic.
