Last night I stumbled on a little movie I hadn’t seen before called Brad’s Status. Brad’s Status is a 2017 film written and directed by Mike White, starring Ben Stiller.
The premise is that Brad (Stiller) is a modestly successful nonprofit director taking his son to college visits (Harvard, Tufts) from his “ordinary” home in Sacramento, and becoming consumed by envy and self-doubt as he measures his life against four college friends who all seem to have achieved spectacular success. There’s a hedge fund billionaire, a tech mogul retired (at 40-something) to a beach in Maui, a gay Hollywood director of notable fame, a published and notable political operative who is a celebrity in his own right. From the moment he fails to be able to buy a seat upgrade for his and his son’s cross-country flight, he is made to feel somewhere between unseen and unappreciated despite having a loving and accepting wife and a high-performance and chill son. What makes the movie so interesting is that it’s essentially a midlife crisis film but more currently relatable and intellectually honest than most. Brad’s internal monologue is petty and unreliable and Brad and the audience knows it from the get-go. The son (Austin Abrams) is a grounded, genuinely talented kid who is embarrassed by his father’s neurotic status obsession and tries consistently to get him under control and to just enjoy the ride. The mid-life crisis extends ever so slightly into the sexual desire realm when Brad meets up with his son’s older high school friend who is already attending Harvard and who looks coincidentally like one of the pan-Asian bimbos that Brad imagine’s his Maui-roaming tech-bro friend is hanging with on the beach all day. At one point he unloads his life disappointments on this young Harvard student (who he sees as the eager and idealistic person he once was) and she delivers a quietly devastating monologue that punctures Brad’s self-pity. The line, “Trust me, you have enough” is left hanging in the air life a dark cloud over his predicament. The film is probing what privilege looks like from the inside and I suspect that we (meaning those of us in the privileged white American class) feel at various times in our lives. Brad is objectively comfortable and loved, but can’t access gratitude because he is too focused and wrapped up in everything he doesn’t have and hasn’t achieved.
The deeper theme at play is the gap between how we narrate our own lives versus reality and how social comparison destroys present-moment contentment. It anticipates a lot of the conversation we all find these days around social media and the status anxiety that became more prominent when we focus too much on Instagram, TicToc, SnapChat and Facebook. Strangely enough, the non-profit that Brad started and runs is one which gives guidance to other non-profits about how best to optimize their use of social media. It is simply too coincidental for this to be anything other than an intentional irony injected by the screenwriter…director…and actor (the gay Hollywood director), Mike White. He’s the guy who brought us the huge hit, White Lotus as well as some really smart, but mildly dark comedies like Orange County, The Good Girl and School of Rock. that leaves me with little doubt that Brad’s chosen career plays directly into the dysfunction that he suffers vis-s-vis his status.
There are some movies that resonate with truth and then there are other movies that are so much to the point that they actually make you feel uncomfortable. I spent most of 102 minutes of this movie feeling very uncomfortable for Brad and his discomfort in his life. I was not disgusted by his whining about his underwhelming status, but by his lack of appreciation for the wonderfully supportive wife who loved and respected him and the high-achievement son who is trying to very cooly go through one of the great stress points in modern youth life. We all grew up playing the game of Life where the threshold assessment I recall that we had to make was how much of our life goals were about Fame, Money or Happiness. I distinctly remember having to fill out a little game card with three lines that were supposed to add to 100. One had a gold star (Fame), the next a green dollar sign (Money) and the third a red heart (Happiness). Strangely enough, when i seek to verify this in the annals of the AI universe, I am told that the original Milton Bradley Game of Life was structured to follow a linear path through life milestones of college or career, marriage, kids, house, retirement (all of which I recall) and the winner is determined primarily by money , specifically who accumulates the most wealth including Life tiles, which have cash values revealed at the end (all details I do not recall). It seems there’s no explicit choice between fame, money, and happiness as competing goals in the original version, but with the proliferation of versions over the years (it was introduced in 1860 and updated in 1960), someone must have decided that life is not just about money…imagine that.
What’s particularly funny about that sentiment is that it is the very dysfunction at the heart of Brad’s status problem. His hedge fund buddy is rich and powerful. His gay director friend is rich and famous. His tech bro friend is rich and happy to the point of distraction and decadence. His political activist friend is a rich celebrity man of influence. Brad is odd man out, despite his having been the centerpiece of his clique in his college days. He is out and not invited to his gay director friend’s wedding in L.A. with the strong implication that his marginalization was because he didn’t matter…because of lack of money and success, defined as his “highly successful” friends chose to define it.
Brad does learn that the “perfect and successful” lives of his old college friends are actually not so perfect nor so successful as they seem. One has a legal/criminal problem, one has a fading glory problem, one has a drug addiction problem and one is just viewed by the younger generation at Harvard as a jerk, and thus has the opposite of respect. But as much as that should resolve Brad’s status concerns, it really doesn’t. The problem was never about where Brad’s status resided, but rather Brad’s unwillingness to be satisfied and happy with his status. That’s why this movie, as obscure and unrecognized as it is hits the mark with me. It reminds me to be thankful for all that I have, not what I don’t have. What matters is a knowing what matters most. Old friends as just that…old friends, and they’re important to remind us of who we are, not what we are not. I think of my buddy, Handy Brad, who I haven’t written of much lately. I do more for myself and Brad is suffering from a bad hip and is waiting for a new one. My hip is fine and I am grateful for that. Is this as good as it gets? You’re damn right it is and life is wonderful… stars, dollar signs and hearts be damned. That’s my status.