After watching Ben Stiller’s
hilarious Tropic Thunder I expected
his next directorial venture to also be a star studded comedy. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is not a
comedy, it’s a tearjerker sappy dramedy, and it’s a bad idea because drama is
clearly not Stiller’s forte.
The second film adaptation of the
short story of the same name and hitting screens after decades of development
hell, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
is visually spectacular, but it doesn’t have a heart or a brain in its script
to turn it into a memorable film. Stiller casts himself in the role of Mitty,
an employee of Life magazine who frequently blacks out and daydreams about all
kinds of stuff. On that front the movie is fun – the cutaways from reality to
dream are seamless and moderately funny. It’s when the film tries to
sentimentalize Mitty’s ‘problem’ and tries to make a statement about ‘quitting
your job and living the dream’ that it fails to find footing.
One other problem is that Stiller
in the lead role here is somehow dull and unsympathetic – you don’t feel
anything for the character. Whether he rollerblades on an Icelandic highway, or
escapes a volcano, or flies a helicopter and jumps into the ocean, or climbs a
mountain in Afghanistan, his expression never changes. Stiller expects you to
be blown away by the imagery and Mitty’s experiences but his own expressions
don’t register that feeling. It doesn’t help that Kristen Wiig once again plays
the exact same awkward mildly stuttering but likable character.
Stiller’s observations of the
contemporary world remain intact. Tropic
Thunder had a geek rambling about a Blu Ray player in a PS3 as opposed to
lack of one in Xbox 360, Walter Mitty sheds some light on the sudden tragic
death of the print industry. There are a couple of sequences where the film
becomes completely over the top in Mitty’s daydream cutaways, if only the rest
of the film were as engaging and intelligent as those two scenes.
(First published in MiD Day)
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