In updating James Thurber’s six-page short story The Secret Life of Walter Mitty to modern times, director-star Ben Stiller plants his titular dreamer in a scenario all too familiar and scary for middle-aged members of the Fourth Estate.
Stiller’s Mitty works for a print magazine that is transitioning to an online-only publication, a move that will result in massive layoffs. The whole nasty affair is spearheaded by a callous bean counter played by Adam Scott, sporting a devilish beard that looks digitally added. The kicker? The magazine is none other than Life, which did in fact cease print in 2007.
We’re aware of the irony of the job: Walter Mitty works for a publication called Life even though he’s experienced none of it. At the film’s opening, he’s just launched an eHarmony account (unlike Thurber’s Mitty, Stiller’s is unmarried) after overhearing that a co-worker crush (Kristen Wiig) had started one. But he’s left the “Places I’ve Been” and “Things I’ve Done” boxes blank, because he’s been nowhere and done nothing.
Even his job at the magazine’s photo department—“negative asset manager”—sounds downbeat and superfluous. At one point, Walter walks away from his laptop, which is foregrounded in the shot, toward the back of the living room of his drab apartment, but Stiller the director keeps the focus on the computer, not Stiller the actor: Walter Mitty literally drifts in the background.
Much of this adaptation is a showcase for moments like these — subtle and not-so-subtle manifestations of Stiller’s directorial ingenuity. Some of his visual segues between scenes are visionary, and onscreen text, which begins with clever placement of the opening credits along the streets of Manhattan, has rarely been used so often, and so effectively, in a mainstream movie.
And Stiller handles Walter’s transitions to fantasyland so beautifully and fluidly that it takes a moment to realize that what we’re seeing is not actually happening. The movie is never funnier than during these fantasies, which include an elaborate, Avengers-style street battle between Stiller and Scott, primarily over a Stretch Armstrong doll; Stiller serenading Wiig as a Latin lover; and Stiller and Wiig spoofing The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
Most of the fantasies take place in the film’s opening third, before Walter finally takes the leap into real life. His impetus is to track down renegade Life photographer Sean O’Connell (Sean Penn) with whom he has developed a rapport at the magazine — and whose latest roll of negatives included a missing image that he calls “the quintessence of life,” a perfect fit for Life’s final cover. This becomes the MacGuffin that sends such Walter to such far-flung locales as Greenland, Iceland and ungoverned Afghanistan, searching for the off-the-grid photographer based on the cryptic contextual clues of the photographs that did make it to Walter’s desk.
There are great gags throughout the film, included a running bit about a passionate eHarmony help-line employee who frequently phones Walter at inopportune times to discuss his profile. Most of the jokes are at the service of an overriding, overly simplistic moral: When we’re always stuck in our heads, we can never really experience life, which can be just as exciting. Cue the “I’ve learning something today…” summa from every South Park episode.
The problem with The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is that it’s so relentlessly sunny. Stiller’s biggest, most lavish directorial effort lacks the caustic edge of Tropic Thunder (still his best work) or the uncompromising disappointments of Reality Bites. From a script standpoint, Walter Mitty the film is nothing but compromise, concession, conceit and contrivance, while the self-actualization of Walter Mitty the character is almost impossibly elegant.
Moreover, the movie’s insistence that audience satisfaction be paramount over all other things is contrary to the essence of Thurber’s story, which is so moving because nothing really changes by the end of it. His Walter ends up resigned to his lot but content with his dreams, a mixed bag of a conclusion that is a lot more like, well … life.
THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY. Director: Ben Stiller; Cast: Ben Stiller, Kristen Wiig, Adam Scott, Shirley MacClaine, Kathryn Hahn, Sean Penn; Distributor: 20th Century Fox; Rating: PG; Opens: Christmas Day, in wide release