Ben Stiller, an actor most commonly associated with
embarrassing-parent movies, released a remake of a somewhat forgotten 1947
movie called “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” It’s a congenial film about a
timid guy who learns to take control of life instead of letting it pass him by.
It’s nothing special, but actually, Ben Stiller—when he wants to be—is a pretty
talented director. “The Cable Guy” is a massively underrated dark comedy,
“Zoolander” is a near perfect farce of fashion culture, and “Tropic Thunder”
was the high water mark in modern comedy until it was regrettably dethroned by
Todd Phillips’ “The Hangover.”
…But
back to this Walter Mitty business. It’s fine. I mean, it’s sappy, and
sentimental, it plays to least adventurous portion of the lowest common
denominator, and the product placement is so blatant that it might as well be a
feature length commercial for Match.com and Papa Johns, but it isn’t
unwatchable. What it is, unfortunately,
is mundane and simple; two words I would have never attributed to Stiller’s
previous directorial work.
Walter
Mitty (Ben Stiller) is a humble photo developer at Time magazine who often
dreams of a better life where he can travel the world like his rock and roll
photographer Sean O’ Connell (Sean Penn) and where he can muster up the
gumption to ask out his workplace crush Cheryl Melhoff (Kristen Wiig). In real
life, however, he can’t even get his online dating profile to work, and he
hasn’t done enough with his life to complete its comprehensive questionnaire. When his new boss—a cartoonish, condescending
tool, played by “Parks and Recreation” actor Adam Scott—comes in to inform the
company that they will be printing the last issue of the magazine, the pressure
is put of Walter to locate a missing frame from Sean O’Connell’s negative. Walter is then forced to track down the
techno-illiterate photographer to the ends of the earth in search of the
mysterious image.
Wallter
Mitty goes on a journey. But it’s not just a geographical journey, you see;
it’s a journey of life, love and self-discovery, which would be fine, if we had
any investment in his character at all. Ben’s performance as Mitty is
thoroughly wishy-washy and one dimensional. The arc of his development through
the story, even though it is being literally forced in the most absurd ways
possible, is never clear or satisfying, and that’s a problem for a film about
self-discovery.
There’s
an aesthetic choice by Stiller to blur the line between reality and fantasy. Walter’s
day dreams seem to manifest into full plot by the middle of the picture, only
to drift back into believability whenever the movie sees fit. I have no problem with this sort of ambiguity
in theory. Certainly, Terry Gilliam made good use of this idea in films such as
“Brazil” and “The Fisher King”. But Stiller seems to use this trope not as a
way of expressing the needs and hopes of Walter, but rather as a lazy device to
move the story along. And in the end, because he can’t keep track of his own
narrative rules, the character’s goals are empty and the romantic resolution
with his crucially underdeveloped love interest feels unearned.
Walter
backpacks a snowy mountain, he’s saved from a shark in below-freezing waters and
he skateboards down a winding street in Iceland, but in all of this action the
movie never lifts out of its mopey, naval-gazing tone and embraces the adventure
of its premise. Photographed like a Nissan
commercial, and paced like a travel channel special, “The Secret Life of Walter
Mitty” probably aims for the life-affirming warmth of “Stranger than Fiction”
or the lovelorn idiosyncrasy of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”, yet,
with all the depth of a motivating office poster, at best, what it ends up
being is something closer to a dude-centric, “Eat Pray Love”.
Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Jan-2014
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