Directed by its star Ben Stiller, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty tries to turn the 1939 James Thurber New Yorker short into a film for our modern age, but instead gives us a large-format re-boot with more than a few smiles and absolutely no surprises. The 1939 original is one of the most anthologized short stories in American literature, with its clear glaze of satire and its eye-rolling inventions combining for a uniquely American vision of middle-aged, middle-class man as he dreams of being more than just stuck in the middle. Written by Steve Conroy (The Promotion), this Mitty keeps the daydreaming title hero, as played by Ben Stiller, but instead of slogging through a day of errands, he’s zoning in and out of his work in the photo department of LIFE magazine, where he helps bring the world to people who, like him, seem to rarely venture out into it.
Thurber’s Mitty worked his concerns about looming war into his daydreams; Stiller’s Mitty is looking at a radically downsized magazine (with the dismantling overseen by MBA-slash-executioner Adam Scott) while pining from afar (or, really, aclose) for co-worker Cheryl Melhoff (Kristin Wiig). Walter has also been tasked with developing the final photo roll from Gonzo photog Sean O’Connell (a surprisingly dry Sean Penn) with frame #25 pre-selected as O’Connell’s pick for the cover photo for the just-announced final print edition of LIFE … and yet frame 25 is missing. And so Walter, spurred on by the fact there’s not much to lose and a whole world out there to gain, goes recklessly in pursuit of O’Connell in hopes of finding frame #25 and the missing final cover …
Walter’s quest takes him out into the (gorgeously photographed) world, where he checks back in with his work and the eHarmony.com advisor (Patton Oswalt) who’s helping him fill out his sparse, unlived online dating profile. In Thurber’s story, the comedy came as the odds and ends of the real world — engine noise, imperatives from the wife, elements on a list of errands — were incorporated in to Walter’s fantasies; in this film, the membrane between dreams and reality seems a lot less defined, and when Walter goes globe-trotting to Iceland and Afghanistan, those excursions feel almost like different kinds of fantasies than they feel like real, lived experiences.
There are some more graceful notes in Walter Mitty between the leaping into helicopters and skateboarding down Fjords; Stiller plays Walter as one of those guys so used to a life of quiet desperation, the only place they can turn up the volume is inside their own heads. Walter’s a decent guy with a tendency to zone out, and Stiller finds stillness in Walter even while having to portray (and direct) the widescreen moments inside his brain. There’s some product placement here – nothing as brute or egregious as The Internship, to be sure – and there’s also the strange seeming disconnect of Stiller making a film so that, in the end, we can discover what a great guy his character secretly is. (Watching Stiller play his scenes opposite Patton Oswalt, the solution seems obvious: Director Stiller should have cast Oswalt as Mitty, not himself …)
Essentially, Walter Mitty boils down and builds up to the same message that’s been offered by the ancient Greek philosophers and screeched out loud at a million Rocky Horror Picture Show screenings: Don’t dream it, be it. And even with the cinematography of Stuart Dryburgh and the editing of Greg Hayden making the film as gorgeous as it is lively, it also feels like a lot of effort for a fairly simple platitude, a Hallmark card’s inside text re-copied as skywriting. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty isn’t an awful film, and its heart is in the right place even as it moves around the globe; it’s just that Stiller’s version of Walter Mitty’s secret life needs a little more life in it.