A College-Bound Lad And His Unbound Dad In 'Brad's Status'
In Mike White's latest film, Ben Stiller plays a middle-aged man so consumed by envy that he fails to grasp how much his emotionally mature son (Austin Abrams) could teach him.
It's an oft-told tale, in Hollywood: A good man wracked by his envy of others he deems more successful than he at scoring the usual American-Dream jackpots of money, status, and fame. He eats himself alive over this at self-defeating length that's both funny and sad. At the climax other, mostly female, not-rich salts of the earth swoop in to persuade him that, OMG, it's a wonderful life just as it is.
Should we smell a rat when to to the recent .
