Brad's Status

Brad Sloan has a solid career, a loving wife and a comfortable home in suburban Sacramento, yet he cannot shake the feeling that he has fallen short of what he once expected of himself. As he travels the East Coast with his musically gifted son Troy to look at colleges, he measures his own life against those of his four closest friends from his student years, who appear to have ended up wealthier and more admired. Meeting them again pushes him to reconsider whether his sense of failure reflects reality or simply his own assumptions about how their lives turned out.

Mike White wrote and directed the film, which followed his earlier work as a writer-director and his long career as a screenwriter. Ben Stiller plays Brad, with Austin Abrams as Troy, Jenna Fischer as Brad's wife Melanie, and Michael Sheen, Jemaine Clement and Luke Wilson among the friends he encounters. Brad Pitt produced through Plan B Entertainment alongside White and Dede Gardner, with Sidney Kimmel Entertainment and Amazon Studios also involved. The production is a modest one, and its worldwide box office of around four million dollars was small. On IMDb it holds 6.5 out of 10 from roughly 20,000 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 6.3 from a much smaller base of 457 votes.