Among the plethora of comedy stars who came up in the 1990s and have continued to mature in the following years,Ben Stillermight be both the most ambitious and the most fascinating overall. Whereas, say,Adam Sandlerhas spent the glut of his career making movies that are made mainly to entertain fart and diarrhea enthusiasts, Stiller went the opposite route and stuck mostly to movies aimed squarely at children following his breakthrough work inThere’s Something About Mary, theGodfatherof gross-out comedies. If you were going to ask me if I’d rather watch innocuous drivel likeNight at the Museumor a wholesale headache the likes ofBlendedorThat’s My Boy, I’d happily suffer a tinyOwen Wilsonand a stampeding CGI dinosaur skeleton.
More importantly, Stiller has produced a number of near-masterworks since the 1990s, includingGreenberg,While We’re Young,The Royal Tenenbaums,Zoolander, andTropic Thunder. He also directed the last two and had a great cameo inMichael Winterbottom’s delightfulThe Trip. He’s currently wrapping up work on the next film byNoah Baumbach, who helmedGreenbergandWhile We’re Young, but word is already coming up about his next promising project. Stiller is now in final negotiations to star inBrad’s Status, a new comedy written and to be directed by the talentedMike White, who wroteRichard Linklater’s excellentSchool of Rock. The film centers on the titular man’s obsession with everyone else’s good fortune over his own, a jealousy that comes to a head while he tours college with his son. Sidney Kimmel Entertainment will be financing and producing the film with Brad Pitt’s Plan B.
Considering White’s long list of strong credits, includingJudd Apatow’sFreaks & Geeksand HBO’s hugely undervaluedEnlightened, this could end up being an openly emotional and hilarious kind of character study, in the same vein as his directorial debut,Year of the Dog, and his script forThe Good Girl. On the other hand, the story has some similarities to Stiller’s self-indulgent, toothless adaptation ofThe Secret Life of Walter Mitty. Like most of Stiller’s filmography,Brad’s Statuscould either be astonishingly insightful or aggravatingly safe, depending on a number of factors that we will be learning about in the next month or so, before the movie begins production in September.
Here’s the initial synopsis forBrad’s Statusvia the press release:
The film centers around Brad, who despite a good career and happy family, is obsessed with the better fortunes of his old friends from school. While escorting his son on an East Coast tour of colleges, Brad is forced to confront his friends and his feelings of failure - with hilarious and poignant results.
