***SPOILER ALERT!***
When
stripped down to its bare bones, Ben Stiller’s adaptation of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is
essentially a modernized, New York-set The
Wizard of Oz. An utterly unremarkable man stuck in a drab, dead-end life
dreams of something more only to be suddenly swept off to some faraway, exotic
land on an adventure of wonder and self-discovery. Loosely based on James
Thurber’s classic short story, Walter
Mitty abandons the central concept of a man who drifts off into daydreams
of an exciting life, often at inconvenient times, fairly early on, instead
diving headlong into a globe-crossing trek as the title character, a negative
developer for Life, goes off in
search of an elusive photojournalist and the missing photo destined to grace to
cover of the magazine’s next – and last – issue. Set at a time of extreme
upheaval for the news world, the movie is preoccupied with the transition from print
to digital, pining for what it sees as the comforting authenticity of the past
even as it perhaps unintentionally yet eagerly embraces the slick technological
advancements promised by the future. It’s this uncertainty, a pervasive
inability to decide exactly what it wants to be, that prevents the film from
truly working and resonating the way it so clearly wants to.
Despite the presence of Stiller
in the director’s chair and the lead role and a cast that also includes Kristen
Wiig, an obnoxious and horrendously bearded Adam Scott, Patton Oswalt and
Kathryn Hahn, Walter Mitty is
decidedly not a comedy. The film adopts a light, upbeat tone, and there are
several moments scattered throughout that aim for laughs with mixed success,
but there’s an underlying pensiveness to the proceedings that pushes it to much
more dramatic, though never dark, territory; it’s about as far removed from Tropic Thunder, Stiller’s previous
directorial outing, as you can get. In fact, the movie works best when at its
most unassuming and straight-faced, either depicting the off-kilter banality of
Walter’s everyday New York City life like in the opening sequence or simply
capturing the awe-inspiring beauty of the countries that he visits, enhanced by
some striking cinematography by Stuart Dryburgh and a jaunty, uplifting
soundtrack. However, too often it becomes cluttered by a meandering, contrived
plot that dips too far into alternately mild yet awkward humor or saccharine
inspiration, not to mention some bizarre product placement.
Though
he’s more known for his offbeat, balls-to-the-wall comedic roles in such works
as Zoolander, Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story and Night at the Museum, this isn’t Stiller’s first time going more
serious, and the performance he turns in is sort of a meeker, less caustic version
of his character in Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg.
He appropriately plays Walter Mitty as almost a blank slate, a man who’s spent
his entire life just going through the motions of living, who never takes risks
or engages in interactions that he doesn’t have to. Yet, perhaps because
Stiller isn’t really the cuddly, instantaneously endearing type or because
Walter can apparently afford to fly off to Greenland or Afghanistan on a whim,
he never quite feels like the Everyman he’s supposed to be. Even after surviving
a shark encounter, escaping an erupting volcano and hiking the Himalayas, he
seems to be fundamentally the same person we met at the beginning of the film,
only slightly more assertive and, ultimately, jobless. Mostly, what he gets out
of his travels appears to be the chance to embellish his eHarmony profile,
which seems weird until you realize that, despite all the breathtaking scenery
(seriously, that alone makes the movie worth watching, though maybe not paying
for) and earnest platitudes about living life to the fullest, this is really a
story about a guy finding the nerve and self-confidence he needs to ask out the
girl of his dreams.
That girl is his new coworker
Cheryl Melhoff, played by a brunette Kristen Wiig. Far removed from exaggerated
cartoons she portrayed on SNL or even
Bridesmaids, Wiig gives off a
charming aura that makes it easy to see why Walter fell for her, and she shares
a subdued but easy chemistry with Stiller. However, her character never quite evolves
beyond the obligatory love interest, feeling more like an ideal than a
fully-fledged human being. Cheryl’s backstory involving a troubled relationship
with her ex-husband is never completely explained. There were times when I
hoped she would turn out to be a figment of Walter’s imagination, a literal
manic pixie dream girl, conjured up by his suppressed desire to break out of
his shell and explore the world, but alas, that likely would’ve been one twist
too many for a movie already suffering from a disjointed narrative. Caught between
comedy and inspirational drama, troubled nostalgia and carefree excitement,
appreciating the ordinary and reveling in the extraordinary, Walter Mitty never establishes a confident
path, floundering particularly in the second half as it performs backbreaking
contortions in order to arrive at a neat, largely predictable ending. By the
time Walter realizes that, like Dorothy, he’s had what he needed with him all
along, it’s hard to not wonder whether the journey, while enjoyable enough in
parts, was really worth taking to reach this destination.
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