The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013)

As a director, Ben Stiller has always had a tendency to make his films look and feel as “big” as possible. That makes sense when you’re dealing with material like Tropic Thunder, which is actually about making an overblown action movie. However, that tactic ends up working against his adaptation of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which is so singularly focused on being grandiose that it becomes incoherent. It’s still a harmless, well-meaning creation, and Stiller clearly has an enthusiasm for this material that is infectious even in the worst of sequences. The problem is he’s never able to translate that enthusiasm into something audiences can connect to. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty spends too much time straining for something to say and not enough time actually saying it.

Stiller casts himself as the titular character, a single man who works with photo negatives at Life magazine. He goes about the same routine almost every day, but he often drifts into elaborate daydreams and spends much of his time longing for his coworker Cheryl Melhoff (Kristen Wiig). When the negative containing the last cover image for Life disappears, Stiller decides to go around the world to try and track it down. This results in numerous adventures in which he jumps onto and off of a helicopter, skateboards down a mountain in an attempt to escape a volcanic eruption, and climbs through the mountains looking for reclusive photojournalist Sean O’Connell (Sean Penn). All the while he must deal with his new, aggressive box Ted Hendricks (Adam Scott) and a nagging customer service representative from eHarmony (Patton Oswalt).

All this is accompanied by a splashy soundtrack featuring original score by Theodore Shapiro and plenty of music from the likes of Arcade Fire, Of Monsters and Men and David Bowie, and the scenery is quite beautifully captured by director of photography Stuart Dryburch. As such, it can’t help but feel like it’s trying too hard, and that’s never more true than when Walter’s fantasies go off the deep end and become action sequences and/or Benjamin Button spoofs. Perhaps Stiller just isn’t suited for PG material like this, since his past, more biting efforts like The Cable Guy, Zoolander and the aforementioned Tropic Thunder all had real, interesting points of view. There’s no such perspective to be found in Walter Mitty, and any message about “following your dreams” is buried beneath the unearned grandeur and formulaic screenwriting. It still works as a fine diversion, but it’s all too clear that Stiller was shooting for a whole lot more.

Grade: B-