The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
Ben Stiller (2013)
One version of the poster for Ben Stiller’s new film has the strapline ‘Stop dreaming, start living’, which is a fair summary of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, and of what’s wrong with it. I enjoyed the movie and there are some good moments even after exciting things really start happening to Walter but it feels increasingly untrue not only to the James Thurber original but also to Ben Stiller’s particular star appeal. The first hour is comically affecting. The second, which feels longer, is generic – the story of how a little guy comes through (and gives up fantasising). Thanks to Stiller the actor, Walter Mitty stays likeable and amusing – even though Stiller the director gets seduced by the visual splendours of the landscapes (shot by Stuart Dryburgh) that Walter moves through on his international travels, and seems unnecessarily determined to make the story heartwarming.
According to Wikipedia, Samuel Goldwyn Jr, whose father produced the 1947 The Secret Life of Walter Mitty starring Danny Kaye, was keen on doing a remake as long ago as the mid-1990s and several scripts have been written without making it to the screen. It’s hard to believe that Steven Conrad’s screenplay, from which Stiller is working, is streets ahead of these other attempts. The set-up has a musty feel, for a start. Walter is a long-serving employee of Life magazine and runs their photographic library. The main storyline is triggered by a takeover of the company, the threat of staff redundancies and the arrival of an obnoxious ‘transition manager’ (Adam Scott). This is clearly meant to be contemporary but the magazine is presented as the real Life was in its photojournalism heyday. That ended in the 1970s, even though there’ve been several reincarnations since. Walter has a jokey modern job title – ‘negative assets manager’ – but the photographic archive in the basement, where he works with a lone assistant (Adrian Martinez), is verging on quaint.
Walter takes delivery of a set of negatives from ace adventurous photojournalist Sean O’Connell (Sean Penn) but one of them is missing and it’s this one, of course, that is to be the cover of the final issue of Life. Walter goes in search of the missing negative and the notoriously incommunicado Sean O’Connell. The quest takes Walter to Greenland, Iceland, Afghanistan, the Himalayas – from the moment he leaps into a helicopter in Greenland Walter Mitty begins to lose comic tone but there’s a lot to entertain you before he does. The film begins with a lovely sequence in which the unassuming, mildly melancholy Walter is trying to summon the courage to begin online communication with Cheryl Melhoff (Kirsten Wiig), the Life co-worker he’s too timid to start a real conversation with. Walter’s nerve fails him when the invitation to ‘send a wink’ to Cheryl first appears on the screen but he takes a deep breath and clicks OK when the invitation reappears. A ‘performance request failed’ message quickly follows. The next scene shows Walter, waiting on a platform with other rail commuters, on the phone to the internet dating agency, trying to find out why the wink didn’t happen. Ben Stiller’s blend of uncertainty and doggedness in these opening bits is a nice illustration of what makes him such an engaging performer.
It’s while he’s on the railway platform that Walter has his first fantasy. This involves superheroism but the scale of his daydreams varies. Walter imagines both spectacular CGI hand-to-hand combat with the jerk transition manager Ted Hendricks and no more than verbal ridicule of him as they ride the office elevator. The modesty of some of the fantasies means there’s a payoff for Walter – and the audience – in modest realities too: getting into conversation with Cheryl, or a skateboard sequence with her and her young son Richard (Marcus Antturi). Walter was into skateboarding in his youth and shows Richard a few moves while Cheryl’s absorbed in a phone call. The two boys sitting near me in the cinema predicted that Walter would fall off the skateboard but he doesn’t: he impresses Richard, although Cheryl keeps turning round just too late to see the moves. The funniest thing for me was the Benjamin Button episode: Walter tells Cheryl, ‘I have that thing … I’m like an old baby – but I’ve not seen the movie so don’t really know how it works’, as the imagining that follows demonstrates. I’m wary of using the word because it’s so overused but I would say this bit of Walter Mitty is surreal. The same goes for a scene in a bar when Walter arrives in Greenland. The massively overweight helicopter pilot-to-be (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) is doing karaoke to ‘Don’t You Want Me?’ and drunkenly insists that Walter joins in, singing as the waitress-in-a-cocktail-bar.
Ben Stiller’s personality keeps the fun going through a shark fight in the Arctic Ocean and a bike ride and skateboard journey, in search of Sean O’Connell and into the teeth of a volcanic eruption. Even in the closing stages, when Walter really tells Ted Hendricks what he thinks of him, the speech is less tedious than it should be, thanks to Stiller’s unassertive edge – although you’d like Hendricks to have a more resounding comeuppance. In this film Ben Stiller combines a clown’s flair with the ability he showed in Greenberg to express a character’s feelings without making them comically explicit. There was a moment when his gait reminded me of Norman Wisdom’s but Stiller, as well as being much funnier than Wisdom, doesn’t beg for your sympathy in the same way, although he can make you feel protective towards him. The Sean O’Connell part of Walter Mitty is weak in various ways. Since he sends an appreciative gift of an inscribed wallet at the start you already know that O’Connell rates Walter, which limits what can and does finally happen. Their eventual meeting, in the Himalayas, where O’Connell has his camera trained on a snow leopard, a creature as elusive as he himself is, fizzles out. Sean Penn is disappointingly vague as the photographer, especially given how long you wait to see him other than as a more-than-lifesize (and, in Walter’s fantasy, momentarily animated) image on a wall of the Life offices.
The other main players give Stiller good support, though – as well as Kirsten Wiig, who’s likeably ordinary and witty as Cheryl, there’s Shirley MacLaine as Walter’s mother and Patton Oswald as Todd Maher, the man from the internet dating agency. MacLaine, now in her eightieth year, still has comic verve; it’s a pleasure too that her timing remains sharp and that she avoids the temptation to make Mrs Mitty cartoonish. Oswald is mainly a voice – Walter’s query about the abortive wink is the first of several phone conversations between him and Todd – but he’s great in his one brief appearance on screen. Kathryn Hahn plays Odessa, Walter’s would-be actress sister. Steven Conrad’s screenplay leaves a lot to be desired as a comic structure but there’s a regular supply of decent lines. When Walter finally (and successfully) asks Cheryl on a date, it’s to see Odessa as Rizzo in Grease – ‘I mean, not on Broadway, in a kind of weird church’.
31 December 2013