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Mike White (left) makes himself one of the images of excess and wealth in "Brad's Status," one of four movies he wrote in 2017 (and the only one he also directed).
Do one for them; do one for you. If you can still do projects for yourself, you can keep your soul.
— Martin Scorsese: A Journey
Why not make a lot of movies and make a lot of money?
Mike White’s 2017 was full of many ups and downs. Few people would be able to make four movies in a year and have them all be good. Mike White decided to split the difference, making two personal projects alongside two painfully obvious cash grabs. White is among the credited writers on The Emoji Movie and Pitch Perfect 3. But that wasn't all. He also wrote and directed the comedy Brad’s Status, a passion project. Finally, he wrote the screenplay for Beatriz at Dinner, directed by Miguel Artera, which serves as a great precursor to his HBO smash hit The White Lotus. Let's look for any common themes or threads for these four scripts that all came out in the same year...
Ben Stiller gives a fantastic performance as the titular role in "Brad's Status."
In his personal projects, White loves to write protagonists who just cannot escape their own heads. In Brad’s Status, Brad (Ben Stiller) is a Father who at any given moment is silently obsessing about how his life compares to his friends’ lives, his son’s potential, or the life of any given person he encounters. Conversely, for Beatriz (Salma Hayek) in Beatriz at Dinner, her head is the only safe place to turn as she weathers a particularly stressful dinner with particularly heinous rich, white developers. To live in the reality of the moment would feel like endorsing their actions. In order to stay true to herself, she needs to remind and refocus herself on her past and her scruples.
If you wade through all the CGI, poop jokes and outdated pop culture references, our protagonist in The Emoji Movie, Gene (T.J. Miller), somewhat fits this mold, too. He’s the meh face emoji who dreams of expressing more emotions. There is the feeling of being “less than” everyone else that Brad feels. Additionally, the ability to express emotions is seen as a detriment to being a part of emoji society, much like Beatriz’s caring impulses are outwardly mocked by her fellow dinner guests. In Pitch Perfect 3, the insecurities of Beca (Anna Kendrick) are front and center. Much like Brad, she doesn’t just unfavorably compare herself to her college friends, she also finds herself jealous of her old a cappella cohort who is still in college, Emily (Hailee Steinfeld). All four of these people are othered, either intentionally or unintentionally. Their choices are either to adapt, as Brad and Beca eventually do, or rebel, as Beatriz and Gene do.
Let’s get the obvious out of the way, there are two good movies here and two bad movies here. It’s not just a binary. Beatriz at Dinner expertly uses cringe humor to dramatize white privilege before veering off into a third act that undoes the subtlety that came before it. Meanwhile, Brad’s Status employs similar cringe tactics, but weaves it into an emotionally fulfilling arc for our narcissistic titular character. Even among the bad movies, Pitch Perfect 3 has funny, witty moments that are drowned out by crazy, seemingly studio mandated, plot turns. Unfortunately, The Emoji Movie has no saving graces. It’s the soulless joke movie that somehow made it to the silver screen, cementing how low our standards for entertainment have sunk.
Few images are more haunting than watching Hi-5 (Corden) barf up a candy corn and then eat it again.
“In this case it affected me in that I felt like I took the credit even though I worked on the movie for three weeks of my life. But taking the credit helps subsidize my life so I can direct an independent movie for a year and so I don’t have any regrets. The fact that I was able to make Brad’s Status means I would do it again.”
- Mike White on The Emoji Movie in the Independent
Brad’s Status feels like the hangover of The Emoji Movie, or perhaps the rationalization midway through the writer’s process. You’ve definitely heard how bad The Emoji Movie is. Vulture dedicated not one, not two, but three pieces screaming about it. None of these pieces exaggerate, it is that bad. To start, is there a more repellant lead duo than T.J. Miller and James Corden? Absolutely not. The world of Alex’s phone never seems particularly clever, and the hierarchy of Textopolis lacks the definition that any of Pixar worlds have. Every corner seems to have been cut, down to the animation style. It’s hard to find the DNA of any writer in this glorified ad of a movie, much less someone as funny and distinctive as Mike White. The closest we come to seeing White’s humor is in Gene’s parents, Mel Meh (Steven Wright) and Mary Meh (Jennifer Coolidge), who find ways to hilariously deadpan fights as worried parents who can only convey “meh.” Still, it’s wrong to call the movie one note. It’s aggressively sour and depressing, as each new turn and note insults the intelligence of the audience members and of its characters. Gene runs from being erased from the phone and finds Jailbreak (Anna Faris), a hacker who wants to escape to the cloud. Ultimately, she saves the day by revealing herself to be a princess and using her princess powers to summon the Twitter bird. For a movie all about breaking out of one’s shell and containing multitudes, it seems to advise that each emoji stay in their box.
In Brad’s Status, Brad is a non-profit worker who laments that all of his friends have sold out and became richer and more successful than him. On a college trip to Harvard, he places his anxieties on his high school son, Troy (Austin Abrams). Time has run out for Brad to have a legacy, so maybe he can live vicariously through his successful son. We see the world through Brad’s incredibly negative inner monologue, always sizing everyone up and himself down. There’s a scene in Brad’s Status where Brad corners Ananya (Shazi Raya), an idealistic friend of his son, at a bar and drones on about his life. He tells her why he wishes he sold out, how the best way to affect change is to make money and the ways he’s disappointed with his life. Extrapolate this to White’s career. He’s done a great job bouncing between meaningful art house fare (Chuck & Buck) and commercial projects that received critical acclaim (School of Rock) and indifference (Nacho Libre). Even on TV, he bounced between populous soaps (Dawson’s Creek) and undersung gems (Freaks & Geeks). It’s almost as if ping pongs between Brad and Ananya. He wants to sell out to fund his dreams, but also still believes he can make meaningful art.
When the first "Pitch Perfect" came out in 2012, few could've predicted it would spawn two sequels, one of which is written by Mike White and Kay Cannon and ends on a yacht explosion.
One sees this pattern when they look at some of Mike White’s interviews. After his HBO show Enlightened was canceled, Mike White told The New Yorker that, “it made me feel like I didn’t have the heart to go deep for a little bit. I was, like, I’ll just take some jobs and write some stuff for hire. I was, like, O.K., they need a writer for “Pitch Perfect 3”? I’ll do it.” There’s a detached nature to Pitch Perfect 3, which he co-wrote with Kay Cannon. The first two movies set up fun character dynamics within a college a cappella group. They’re not high art, but they were fresh, girl-powered college movies that blended sweetness with a bit of tart. White and Cannon are able to recreate some of the patter that made the Bellas a fun group to follow. Unfortunately, it creates the cardinal sin of going too big, almost as if they were dispatched by the studio to make Pitch Perfect the latest blockbuster. Like Baumbach’s Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted, the Bellas head overseas in one of the most convoluted set-ups possible. Aubrey (Anna Camp) has an army Father that earns the now-graduated Bellas a chance to reunite and simultaneously compete to be the opener for DJ Khaled.
We could’ve got a spiritual successor to where we leave Troy in Brad’s Status. What happens when you transition from college and have to make something of yourself? Beca asks herself this, quitting her job in the opening moments as she chooses idealism over practicality. If only the movie cared more about this journey for her. Instead, shipping the girls overseas serves as impetus for empty comedy set pieces and wall to wall musical performances. A subplot involving Fat Amy (Rebel Wilson) and her con-artist Father, Fergus (John Lithgow, also in Beatriz at Dinner), gets blown out of proportion in the film’s third act. Soon, Fergus has kidnapped all of the Bellas on a yacht, threatening to kill them unless Fat Amy relinquishes her trust fund. It’s almost as if Cannon and White are mocking the higher budget the studio gave them. Anna Kendrick leads the girls in an a cappella performance of “Toxic” while Rebel Wilson performs Bond level stunts, eventually blowing up the boat and saving the girls. How did we get here and what does it have to do with our story?
Salma Hayek struggles to survive a hellish dinner with the worst group of entitled white people in "Beatriz at Dinner."
There’s one crucial element that The Emoji Movie and Pitch Perfect 3 lack as Mike White projects (okay, many lacking elements). They never question their protagonists' motivations or privileges. There could be a really interesting version of Pitch Perfect 3 where Fat Amy shows interiority regarding her newfound wealth. Instead, we get a hollow, almost pro-military (or at least military-agnostic) romp that ups the ante with abandon. In Brad’s Status, Brad doesn’t just learn that the grass isn’t greener on the other side, he realizes he should be grateful that he has any grass. In Beatriz at Dinner, White threads an interesting needle with Hayek’s titular character. How can she be so confident in her worldview, which does include mysticism, without being a “magical” person-of-color? The best decision he makes is to show Beatriz struggle in her convictions. These horrible people she’s at dinner with delight in their excess. What can she do? Should she even do anything? Beatriz decides to drink more and more, letting her true thoughts fly as her inhibitions loosen.
So much of Beatriz at Dinner rings true. Much of what made The White Lotus such a great watch was the ways in which White dramatized and skewered the hoops white people jump through to not display their true intentions. So many of those observations were kernels in Beatriz at Dinner, the most powerful being Connie Britton’s Kathy, a hostess who wants to do right by Beatriz, but only when it’s convenient and aligned with her guests’ politics. The movie is most interesting when characters like Kathy see how privilege affects them, choosing to uphold the status quo because it benefits them.
Mike White’s thesis is summed up nicely by Ananya's response to Brad after his diatribe: “You’re 50 years old and you think the world was made for you.” The people at Kathy’s dinner and the Bellas all see themselves as exceptionalists, where the world is their playground and not getting what one wants is an unfathomable setback. A dark reading of The Emoji Movie posits that a whole entire world and ecosystem hangs in the balances of the whims of a 14-year-old. The best of White’s characters all must confront the fact that they are small specks in a big big world. Eventually, like Beatriz, we will all sink back into the ocean.
Previous Entries:
- M. Night Shyamalan's 1999 - The Sixth Sense and Stuart Little
- Noah Baumbach's 2013 - Frances Ha and Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted
What is your favorite movie by Mike White?