Film Review: “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”

The first movie based on James Thurber’s most famous short
story, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” was adapted
for the screen back in 1947, starring the multitalented Danny Kaye in the title
role. Walter Mitty, a timid, passive, henpecked
husband, embarrassingly incompetent at ordinary tasks, constantly falls into
daydreams in which he assumes such heroic roles as flying through a storm,
shooting down German aircraft, and performing delicate surgery. Everyday life
triggers his fantasies — a headline about a trial inspires him to see himself
in a courtroom, passing a hospital leads to his surgical feat. The story ends
with a characteristic Thurber touch of comic defeat.

The work seems a natural for the cinema, the art of dreams
and daydreams; film quite naturally exploits the transitions from a present
reality to the insubstantial but far more satisfying subjects of memory and
fantasy. We all dream, after all. We all want to be the heroes of our own
lives. We all need to escape from what one of my favorite authors
calls the deadly rhythm of our private thoughts.

In this adaptation of the story Walter Mitty,
played by Ben Stiller, works for Life magazine, in charge of the negatives
their photographers submit from all over the world. He discovers that the
magazine is folding, moving to an online version, which means he and many
others will lose their jobs. Lonely, burdened by the cost of moving his mother
(Shirley MacLaine) to an assisted-living facility, he
tends to fall into a sort of trance. His fantasies feature him making a
connection with Cheryl Melhof (Kristen Wiig), a young woman at the magazine, rescuing the
inhabitants of a burning building, humiliating the arrogant executive in charge
of the transition.

Walter finds the opportunity to become a hero accidentally,
when he searches for a lost negative from the magazine’s ace photographer, Sean
O’Connell (Sean Penn), intended for the cover of the final issue. He takes off
on a wild and unlikely journey looking for O’Connell, which takes him to
Greenland, Iceland, Afghanistan, and the Himalayas. He travels by plane, boat,
bicycle, helicopter, and even skateboard on his quest, encountering eccentric
people and strange adventures along the way.

Although the quest itself takes place in Walter’s “real”
life, he often falls into his daydreams in the midst of what already seems a
fantasy. In one of the oddest and funniest sequences, he encounters a drunken
helicopter pilot singing in the only karaoke bar in Greenland, then discovers
the guy can lead him to the photographer. The chopper promptly drops him in the
sea, which leads to yet another series of adventures and fantasies. At times the
director deliberately fuses and confuses Walter’s actual experiences on his
unusual quest with his usual daydreams.

Although it toys with the visually fascinating concept of
dreams and their possibilities in ordinary life, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” seldom explores the theme with the imagination it
deserves. Walter’s search, the mysteries he must solve, the completely
unsurprising pat ending, and the tiresomely predictable love between him and
Cheryl simply overwhelm the notion of the dream life and its connections to
what we like to regard as real life, that endlessly fascinating subject for the
cinema.

Ben Stiller has come more and more to resemble Woody Allen in
the sense that he continues to play the same character over and over in all of
his movies, an earnest, naïve victim of an assortment of nasty, plotting dopes,
who ultimately triumphs, mostly through his own innocent good nature. His
Walter Mitty is virtually interchangeable with the
parts he played in “There’s Something About Mary,”
“Meet the Parents,” “The Watch,” and so on. On the other hand, “Walter Mitty” provides him with a Mittyesque
experience, directing a picture in which he plays the adventurous hero of his
own fantasies, possibly a fantasy within a fantasy.

Oddly, the sets play the most interesting part in the movie.
The Time-Life building is the real thing, and the sequences
in Greenland, Iceland, and the East look very real indeed, and employ
people native to those regions. “Walter Mitty” may
not be good, but it looks great.

This article appears in Jan 1-7, 2014.