He thinks everyone else is better off

Director Mike White casts Ben Stiller as a father whose confidence is lagging in Brad's Status.

Ben Stiller knows how to squirm in his own skin. Cheers for writer/director Mike White, who has found the perfect vehicle for Stiller to express a nearly intractable case of mid-life jitters. In Brad's Status, Stiller portrays a father who accompanies his son on a tour of the New England colleges to which the young man has applied. The trip forces Stiller's Brad to evaluate his own life. Mostly, he doesn't like what he sees.

Brad believes his old college chums have surpassed him in the success department, and Brad wonders whether he hasn't wasted his life running a non-profit when he could have been focused on magnifying his bank account.

Not that Brad is suffering. And that, ultimately, may be the movie's point. Brad and his wife (Jenna Fischer) live a comfortable life in California with a son (Austin Abrams) who's going to have no difficulty attending a good college and finding a place for himself in the world.

But Brad is undone by his ceaseless competitiveness. He insists on evaluating his life in terms of others -- even to the point where he might be envious of his son should the young man be admitted to Harvard. Brad graduated from Tufts, a fine school but not Harvard.

White, who wrote the screenplays for Chuck & Buck, The Good Girl and Beatriz at Dinner and who directed Year of the Dog, this time adopts an accessible approach, keeping his focus on the way Brad's rampant feelings of inferiority look when contrasted with what seem to be his more or less problem-free life.

To make the point, White's screenplay introduces us to the men with whom Brad compares himself.
White plays a successful movie director who happens to be gay but who didn't invite Brad to his wedding. Luke Wilson portrays a hedge fund manager who has acquired all the accouterments of great wealth, including a private jet. Jermaine Clement appears as Billy, a tech whiz who made a fortune and retired to Maui to live with two young women who know how to fill out bikinis.

Michael Sheen's Craig rounds out the quartet of jealousy-inducing stories that torment Brad; Sheen's Craig is a pundit who often appears on TV. He teaches a course at Harvard and can't make it through a restaurant dinner without someone approaching him to offer praise.

During Brad's visit to Boston, he and Troy meet one of Troy's friends. Shazi Raja portrays a young woman who seems to grasp the magnitude of privilege that supports Brad's life, but she's not entirely likable, either. She's a little too glib, a little too quick with her accusations, and a little too disrespectful of Brad's experience.

That, too, gives Brad's Status a welcome sense of realism.

White brings the movie to a somewhat predictable conclusion and he pretty much follows a blueprint in scenes that show us that the objects of Brad's envy aren't problem free. Everything looks better when viewed from the outside, and Troy seems far better adjusted than a father who picks at his life as if it were a scab that's beginning to itch.

OK, so it's not an insight that will rock your world, but White delivers it in a movie that manages to be easy going and troubled at the same time -- more insightful and a bit more rueful than you'd expect from what initially sounds like such an unpromising premise.

Another look at life gone sour

Jenna Fischer's the highlight of this sometimes amusing, but negligible tale.

In A Little Help, Jenna Fischer plays a Long Island dental technician who's mired in a faltering marriage. As a result, Fischer's Laura has become a little too fond of beer, a little too negligent about herself. She's also convinced that her husband (Chris O'Donnell) is having an affair.

Fischer isn't afraid to show us Laura's unraveled state. At times, we see the beauty that once touched the hearts of high school boys. At other times, we see a beleaguered working wife and mother who no longer gets much pleasure out of life.

Fischer gives a strong performance in a movie that early on drops its major dramatic bomb: O'Donnell's character dies of a heart attack.

Thus begins Laura's process of recovery. She begins to feel her way toward a new life, no simple matter. She's constantly berated by her sister (Brooke Smith) for failing to take responsibility for her life. Her mother (Lesley Ann Warren) isn't much better, and her father (Ron Leibman) is too busy recounting his triumphs as a former sports writer to pay much attention to anyone else.

Meanwhile Laura's son (Daniel Yelsky) tries to adjust to life at a new school by telling a whopping lie to gain sympathy. He puts his mother in an awkward position: Either she must play along or make her son even more miserable. This fib gives the movie an unpleasant tilt because Daniel's lie borders on the indefensible.

As if all this weren't complicated enough, Laura's brother-in-law (Rob Benedict) mostly submits to his wife's bullying while trying to be a pal to his teen-age son, an aspiring rock musician.

There's nothing particularly compelling about any of this, and writer/director Michael J. Weithorn never fuses the movie's parts into a satisfying whole.

Oh well, a negligible movie might have been even more negligible without Fischer, best known for her work on TV's The Office and, in A Little Help, operating at her exasperated and often funny best.