The Secret Life of Walter Mitty suffers the most from comedic expectations rather than the actual substance of the film itself. Watching Ben Stiller’s latest directorial work, I’m surprised by the contrast between this quiet character study versus Tropic Thunder’s incredibly offensive, if funny, brand of crazy. And I guess character study pushes it, since this movie fits more into the vein of a specific genre: indie films. That does not mean indie in the way you suspect, but indie in terms of, let’s say, Garden State. You know, drugs are bad, or daydreaming is bad, so just live your life to the fullest!
A remake of an older film (which was, itself, an adaptation of a novel), the primary concept revolves around a powerless daydreamer known as Walter Mitty. In our contemporary version, Mitty works for Life Magazine’s print arm just as it is about to expire and be placed online forever. Since Mitty works at the photo department, it’s his job to prepare the final cover – but the photo’s missing! However, he doesn’t know the first place to look except…Greenland, the last place where his photographer went. And the movie goes on from there with dark color schemes, anthemic music, and whatever else you’d expect. Everything ends much like you would expect: Ben Stiller plays soccer with Afghani people in the mountains, and everything works out I guess!
That’s not the whole story, though. Walter Mitty is, predominantly a person characterized by inaction and a lack of intestinal fortitude. He daydreams about how the world might be more interesting than real life all the time, from personal relationships to fighting with his boss. All of these daydreams fill his days, and it comes primarily from a lack of power and agency in his own life. Something, or someone, needs to snap him out of his self-imposed stupor and get to living again. You know, like making relationships or getting a girlfriend or figuring out real life’s more than what you could imagine?
The problem is, the movie fails to do much of anything with the “Secret Life”, other than to mention it a few times. Yeah, I get it, he’s a daydreaming introvert or should sound like one, but he makes a very suddenly journey to becoming more open with the rest of the human race. Daydreams motivate him there, and then they disappear, which sends a lot of mixed messages. It’s almost as if (gasp) they took a name without seeming to understand what it meant. Who, exactly, does Walter Mitty “stand up to” in this version? From what I can read, people insult and coddle him in the original versions. None of that happens here in any way, shape, or form, giving us little conflict and little stakes in the end.
And then, furthermore, there’s a strange problem with tone. I find myself having a hard time describing this film just simply due to the weird complexity of the premise, and the seemingly unrelated nature of the name to the content within. See, really, the whole “daydreaming” thing barely takes up any portion of the film; those remain the primary exciting parts of the film, and the ones containing most of the humor. The rest just proceeds like any typical indie film, with notions of improving your life and going beyond what you know coming up…often. But then it tries to be funny every once and a while in a way inconsistent with what should happen in a film like this. Add to the fact that Life Magazine would apparently (or maybe not, I don’t know and that isn’t) pay for Mitty to just fly around looking for some dude just makes the whole plot a bit of a mess.
Is The Secret Life of Walter Mitty entertaining? Yeah, sure, like any other movie contains entertainment. But I’m not really sure what it’s about, why we needed obviously high cost special effects for no reason, or traveling to distant countries, or snow leopards, or a bounty of product placement.
And for once, I have nothing more to say!
