Critics reviews

From Ben Stiller's pantomimes of romantic hesitation in its opening moments as Walter Mitty goes all J. Alfred Prufrock on eHarmony.com, to costar Adam Scott's fussily styled fake beard, to the overall depiction of how a print magazine works/worked, to the consoling midtown-Manhattan romantic fade out, "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty"... grated on my nerves something fierce.

Painstakingly stylish, this is Stiller's most ambitious directorial work to date but also his most cloying, a Hallmark card piously urging viewers to "embrace the unknown," among other platitudes. Some scenes are sharpened by his quirky sense of humor (a bizarre riff on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button recaptures the cheekiness of his MTV sketch show), but this lacks the satire of Tropic Thunder or the dark comedy of The Cable Guy, still his best movies.

It's once the daydreams stop and Mitty jets off to Greenland in search of Penn's itinerant shutterbug (and "actual" adventure) that the film takes an unexpected turn for the dull. Abandoning its more original elements, the movie opts for a banal carpe diem conceit that turns Mitty into a globetrotting bystander, with few opportunities to cut loose à la Danny Kaye.

Exquisitely produced, immaculately acted, and thoroughly uninvolving, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a perfect nothing of a movie. It takes James Thurber's beloved short story about a man who spends all his time daydreaming of heroic feats in far-away places, and expands upon it in the most schematic, belabored way.

Ben Stiller's aggressively bathetic take on the material isn't likely to satisfy Thurber fans or neophytes, resembling as it does a feature-length soft drink commercial. Privileging special effects over his putative hero's psyche, Stiller... seems to perceive Mitty as a sort of superhero of the imagination, which completely undermines the story's satirical intent; at the same time, the knowledge that nothing is real scuttles any thrills. It's the worst of both worlds.

Walter Mitty may be a film that features a character who's basically a retargeting ad that speaks in sponsored tweets, but it's beautiful in a way that neither mainstream nor independent films aspire to anymore. As much as the setting and Walter's profession might suggest, the film is a eulogy for the medium's passing—whatever you're supposed to feel for Walter (and probably don't), you might be made to feel about 35mm.

A bittersweet sequence cutting between Richie and Sydney in matching curlers while they flirt on the phone shows the film's eye for the telling backstage detail. Elaborate and deceptive hairstyling becomes a metaphor for the film's shiny, perpetually shaky con... Giddy with the explosive possibilities of a pinballing posse of richly textured characters, the film gradually goes long on the con artists and short on the con. While still hugely enjoyable, it becomes more of a saunter than a hustle.

This updated Walter Mitty, written by Steve Conrad but no doubt sharpened by Stiller, is preceded by the 1947 adaptation starring Danny Kaye (not to mention Billy Liar) and might suggest a nerd-breaking-out-of-his-shell romcom. But from the deftly staged opening onward, Stiller makes the most of his comic timing and, especially his underappreciated skills as a dramatic actor.

For Ben Stiller, apparently, Thurber's classic story is grist not for a sympathetic exploration of the universal human desires to dream and live, but to craft what eventually amounts to a totem to his own vanity. How else to explain its increasingly exasperating collapse into scene after scene that extols Mitty's, and by extension Stiller's own, heroic goodness, culminating in an actual canonization on the front of the final print issue of Life magazine?

What would inspire a man of near-crippling passivity to leave his 16-year job, suddenly fly to Greenland, jump out of helicopters, skateboard towards an erupting volcano, or scale the Upper Himalayas? Screenwriter Steven Conrad (The Pursuit of Happyness) doesn't make a convincing case for the Bear Grylls transformation, and the dramatic stakes—aside from romantic rejection or losing a job—are speed bumps ex machina at worst.

[Walter Mitty becomes] not a portrait of a flawed individual struggling for self-improvement and transcendence, but merely a cornball carpe diem-ish fable of prevailing over any and all obstacles through positive thinking and a can-do attitude. Stiller's aesthetics blend overly manicured imagery with soaring rock songs that underlines every emotion, lest the film's corporate logo-driven message-making didn't get the point across clearly enough.