Ben Stiller has been featured in a lot of movies this year. If you can only see one, then see The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected). When I read the description of the film, I started to run the other way until the preview captured my attention. I was so excited to see Brad’s Status that I saw it on opening night in theaters, but left feeling dissatisfied. I should have trusted my first impression. The film is about a middle-aged man taking his son to his old stomping grounds to look at colleges. He feels like he fell short of his potential and compares his life to his college friends, who seem to outpace him in terms of wealth, fame, desirability or influence.
If Brad’s Status had simply captured the sense of loss of options as one nears death and the recognition that your child does not know how quickly this moment passes or compared and contrasted youthful expectations with adult reality, I probably would have loved it because who hasn’t wondered if one had taken a slightly different step how different and possibly better things would have turned out. I went to Harvard….twice. I regularly see my friends doing way better than me, which trust me, is not that hard, so at some point these things cross your mind. To be fair, a lot of them started out as better human beings than me so it is as it should be. The trick is pinpointing whether or not society instilled the dissatisfaction or if you do actually need to live life differently to find satisfaction because you lost sight of why you wanted to achieve a certain goal along the way.
S
P
O
I
L
E
R
S
I actually work in a comparatively low paying job that some would argue benefits the public, but I believe in what I do. Even on my worst days, I am invested in the outcome to some degree. I would like to think that I do not flash my title to be seen by others as a good person. I would also like to think that I am a good friend or at least try to be. I am willing to do or give whatever I can to make someone’s life better. I rarely ask for favors or if I perceive that someone thinks that I am, I withdraw, which may not be an emotionally healthy way of navigating the world, but there it is. If I do enjoy someone’s benevolence, I try to glean from what the friend is already doing anyway such as a drive somewhere that the person was already going to go to. It is a sign of trust when I can accept my friend’s generosity and not expect them to hold it over my head later on (this has happened for example, in connection to a birthday dinner that someone insisted on giving me then complained about the food and the expense later—no, thank you).
By my standards, Brad is an awful human being. He talks about his job to gain brownie points, but I had no idea how he actually helped people and suspect that he actually doesn’t. He didn’t seem to care about it. He was jealous of his son’s success and potential. He was an awful friend. He seemed to only contact them when he needed something. He didn’t actually like them. He wasn’t happy for them. If your friend says that he is at the Mayo Clinic and is not a doctor, shut the fuck up and ask them what is happening. Brad is too old not to understand the gravity of being at that location. The biggest betrayal was emotionally cheating, which may be completely human and understandable, but I could not relate to.
The most horrifying moment in Brad’s Status is when he decides to have drinks alone with his son’s friend. In my head, I screamed, “Noooooooooooo!” I don’t care if nothing happened, the fact that his wife, a human being whom he allegedly loves, was just another status symbol to him to theoretically swap for younger, more talented models, was gross. I’m not saying that he can’t see shortcomings in his marriage, which he did not. I’m not saying that he can’t notice that these younger women are incredibly talented, smart and hot. They are. In theory, I can fantasize about Idris Elba and Daniel Craig, but once I get to know them as real people and still reduce them to their looks or simply what they can do for me instead of who they are, I’m the problem. Brad never relates to or fully interacts with the world. He wants the world to serve him.
While I applaud the fact that Brad’s Status depicts interesting, real women of color and that they morally ground the movie and the titular character, it provided me with an unfortunate realization. I would prefer if the movie focused on them. Instead Brad and the film conscript her into being the person that helps him have an epiphany-that his life is actually good. I think that we need more movies about older people floundering and wondering what they will be when they grow up-yikes, they already have, instead of from a younger person’s perspective. There are plenty of movies about younger people going to college. Unfortunately this movie is not the one that I wanted.
Brad’s Status is a social horror movie. I understand that Brad was supposed to be problematic on some level, but by the end of the film, I don’t really believe that he learned anything other than his friends’ lives were not as perfect as he thought. I think the film and the character share the same problem. They both really believe on some level that everyone does exist to serve Brad while simultaneously intellectually understanding that is not true. At its heart, neither Brad nor the film believes in ensembles, but stars.