“Brad’s Status” Could Be Your Status

Release Date：Sep/15/2017

Genre：Comedy/Drama/Music

Director：Mike White

Cast：Ben Stiller、Austin Abrams、Jenna Fischer、Luke Wilson、Jemaine Clement、Michael Sheen

Viola's Rating：7.4

Living in a society so stressful nowadays, people doubt their lives regularly. Four years ago, Ben Stiller acted and directed in the feature film “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”, which caused a sensation at the time. Stiller recently had his latest film “Brad’s Status” on a similar issue on September 15, 2017.

Still the leading actor, in this dramatic, musical comedy, Stiller plays a father who takes his son to tour colleges on the East Coast, where most of the best schools are, and meets up with an old friend who makes him feel inferior about his life’s choices and situation.

An amazing actor he is, Stiller is famous for starring in comedies and as an anxiety-filled and inadequate character. One of the main reasons that “Brad’s Status” is critically acclaimed is Stiller’s performance, which is funny and substantive. Perfectly shows the protagonist’s mindset, Stiller takes us to tour his world through dialogues and monologues. His character constantly asks himself questions and has his own drama in his mind throughout the flick. Even though some of them are inappropriate or silly, he always reasons himself immediately just as normal people would do all the time.

“Brad’s Status” not only has Stiller such an awesome talent as the leading actor, it’s produced by Brad Pitt, who also produced Oscar winning motion pictures like “12 Years a Slave”, “Moonlight”, “The Big Short”, etc. It would be interesting to know the reason why the main character’s called Brad. Is it related to its producer? Is he confused about his life right now as well? Even if that’s true, there’s no doubt that he did produce a brilliant movie and he’s successful in many aspects.

As mentioned in the beginning, the theme of “Brad’s Status” is similar to Stiller’s previous picture “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”. They both emphasize on pondering over the meaning of life and one’s life itself. However, there’s a big difference between them. “Brad’s Status” is closer to regular life, and thus is more related to reality while “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” pursues a dream that’s wonderful but may not fulfill. It encourages its audience to seek their ideal lifestyle, and “Brad’s Status” evaluates how everyone’s life’s different from the others, and how we can look on the bright side about it.

Watching “Brad’s Status” might help you examine and scrutinize your own status. At the beginning, moviegoers might feel satisfied with the simplicity of Stiller’s life, and then become anxious with him. While he tries to fix his life through different methods, the audience might relate to themselves and start wondering how they look at things in their lives. Eventually, after Stiller realizes the problem of his status, moviegoers will also have something to take away from the feature film.

Picture Credit: IMDb