There is no denying the precise motive behind Mike White setting the stage for 2017’s Brad’s Status in Sacramento. It is the perfect place for someone to willingly fade away. To allow hope and promise to atrophy into the acceptance of being average and middling. The problem is, at forty-seven, Brad Sloan (Ben Stiller) is feeling a bit too reflective about the “mistakes” of his past, spurred on by a trip to Boston with his son, Troy (Austin Abrams), to look at colleges including Harvard and Brad’s own alma mater, Tufts. It is the thought of his college days that gets him thinking all the more about his former friends, Craig Fisher (Michael Sheen), a political powerhouse, Billy Wearslter (Jemaine Clement), who made his money in tech and retired at forty, Jason Hatfield (Luke Wilson), a finance guy, and Nick Pascale (Mike White), a Hollywood heavyweight. By comparison, Brad’s life feels small, unimportant. At least to him.
Still sticking to his now faux idealistic guns with regard to what he pursued in college, Brad runs a non-profit business that helps other non-profits raise funds by connecting to potential interested parties via social media. As Brad explains it in one of his many voiceovers (for that is the mark not only of a Billy Wilder movie but a Mike White one), it’s “like a matchmaking service, social media matchmaking organization that would find the organizations that need the money, find the people who want to give money, bring them together…” While still enthusiastic about his cause when fresh off the boat from college, he tries to ask Craig for aid by “roundaboutly” mentioning the project to him. Craig deliberately seems to not bite, prompting Brad to humiliatingly recount, “Back in Sacramento, I decided to be more direct. I sent him an email asking him to come onto my board of directors. I wrote about the worthiness of the cause and my deep respect for Craig and how much it would mean to me personally.”
Apparently, it did not mean as much to Craig personally, who chose never to respond to said email. And so it was that Brad’s process of being made “irrelevant,” at least from his perspective, began. Steadily ensconced in the inconsequence of “being Sacramentan,” he sees everyone else around him as steadily rising through the ranks as he remains utterly stagnant. And as he lies in bed next to his wife, Melanie (Jenna Fischer), in the opening scene, his sense of defeat is utterly palpable even before he asks her what her parents’ house is valued at (two million?). After being told that there’s not much hope of pilfering the coffer when her parents die, he explains, “I just feel like we’re running out of time. It’s like there’s no more potential. This is it. We’ve plateaued. It’s not like there’s gonna be some… windfall that, you know, suddenly changes our situation.”
With this in mind, the only “chance” he has to make up for his own life is through his son, and the potential success that might come with his genius. Something that Brad initially projects as a fantasy of him being on the cover of Wired magazine and announcing at a dinner with his black girlfriend that he owes everything to his parents and he’s recently purchased an island. A fantasy that quickly devolves into him being convinced, “What if Troy lorded his success over me, or hoarded it away? What if, in the end, Troy’s wins made me feel even more the failure? What if I became envious of my own son?” Considering how Brad is envious of pretty much anyone and everyone else around him, it wouldn’t come as a shock. That the crux of his problem is constantly comparing himself to others (part and parcel of what social media outlets have further conditioned us to do) often makes for cringe-worthy moments throughout the “floating through life” narrative. Like when he tries to upgrade his economy class plane tickets to business class and is soon informed, “Seems as though you bought those tickets on a discounted website, and with that type of ticket, we can’t do the upgrade… There’s actually no amount of money you can pay to get an upgrade.” The sentence, of course is rife with dual meaning, and is particularly stinging to Brad, who feels incontrovertibly stuck in his banal existence. One he feels could have gone differently if he hadn’t succumbed to marrying Melanie, always seeming so “content” with everything. And, ultimately, it was only because she got a job in Sacramento that they moved there (the nature of said job never being mentioned because one supposes it’s just that blasé). Looking around at what he has “allowed” to happen, Brad comments, “Some guys have empires. What do I have? I live in Sacramento, a secondary market surrounded by mediocrities and beta males.” He being among such beta males with his mild-mannered repression and so-so non-profit. The only thing he can categorically say he’s succeeded at is complete self-loathing intermixed with the required self-involvement needed to achieve it with such perfection.
In Boston, Brad is given the chance to reinvigorate a slight flicker of the fire he had while in college when Troy introduces him to a friend of his who is already going to Harvard named Ananya (Shazi Raja). Initially interested in what Brad has to say, as well as his profession, he later feels the need to make it weird by meeting up with her and her fellow musician friend, Maya (Luisa Lee), after Troy goes to sleep. Because that’s not odd or narcissistic at all. And when his plan to just “happen upon” them works, he ends up keeping Ananya at the bar until closing, prattling on about “how he really feels” about the false idealism of being political while still in college until he can finally pick up on the fact that she’s only being polite by continuing to listen to him, prompting Brad to ask her what she’s thinking. She replies, “It’s just, from where I sit, it kind of seems like white privilege, male privilege, first-class problems.” Brad, shamed, responds, “Okay. I… You know, I know I might seem like some cliche to you, but this is actually my life, okay?” She shrugs, “Just… don’t ask me to feel bad for you. You’re doing just fine. Trust me. I promise you; you have enough.”
It is an assurance that does not assuage Brad. Least of all when the time comes for him to call in a favor for Troy from Craig, who guest lectures at Harvard, so that he can secure another interview for his son, foolishly having mixed up the day and time he was supposed to go to the office. In between his absurd fantasies about having the same kind of Hawaiian beach life as Billy or the luxury of a private jet like Jason, he feels generally unsatisfied and overlooked. As though having the money that he assumes comes with white male privilege should be automatic rather than earned. Bequeathed to him by the sheer virtue of him choosing a “nobler” track, which somehow doesn’t come across as noble when he’s always prattling on about it.
When finally faced with the obsequious dinner as requisite asshole-licking for the interview Craig got for Troy, Brad’s feelings of inadequacy are briefly tempered when Craig reminds him that the grass is not always as green as it looks from the inside when he talks about Billy’s drug habit, Jason’s recent trouble with the law and Nick’s overly pandering to the gay life the more accolades he receives. All Brad can reply is, “Oh. Huh. I’m so in the dark.” Craig goads, “Well, that is what happens to you when you drop out and you move to Sacramento.” Brad counters, “I’m… I moved to Sacramento. I didn’t drop out.” Craig would beg to differ with the incredulous retort, “Why did you move to Sacramento?” Suddenly realizing that Craig doesn’t care even remotely as much about Brad’s life as Brad does about his, he walks out of the restaurant after declaring, “I can’t… can’t do this. I don’t know whatever this is. I can’t…” Maybe the “this” is continue to compare himself to people so self-involved they wouldn’t care about what he was doing anyway unless he achieved nothing short of being elected president. That’s when everyone really pays attention to you, after all.
So it is that Brad has his grand epiphany about the basicness of his Sacramentan life while in Boston. He’s suddenly revelatory about the gratitude he has for even still being alive. Because, for as cynical as he is, he knows that’s not nothing. And that perhaps he ought to appreciate it more by ceasing the disease of comparison to others who are just as unhappy in their own way… /can’t even consider what he’s doing in the first place when they’re so goddamned concerned with themselves as part of the unspoken full-time job of being human.
