The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty review: Soulful Ben Stiller’s a dream ticket in engaging adventure

Zoolander star delivers a soulful reworking of James Thurber’s short story

Ben Stiller in the whimsical 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty' (Wilson Webb)

Ben Stiller’s version of Walter Mitty isn’t the high jinks, Zoolander-style comedy that might have been expected. Instead, it’s a sweet-natured study of a downtrodden middle-aged man rediscovering his mojo. This is an altogether more soulful reworking of James Thurber’s short story than the one offered in the 1947 Danny Kaye movie.

Mitty (played by Stiller himself) is a “negative asset manager” at Life magazine. That’s a long-winded way of saying he looks after the photo library. As the film starts, the magazine is about to publish its final print issue. There has been a corporate takeover and most of the staff members, Mitty included, are likely to lose their jobs. He is self-effacing and inarticulate. When he fills in his profile on a computer dating site, he leaves large sections blank because he “hasn’t really done anything” in his life. Most of his daydreaming involves fantasies in which he impresses his colleague, pretty single mom Cheryl (Kristen Wiig) who works in accounts.

In Thurber’s original story, the transitions between the character’s everyday life as a henpecked husband and his fantasy existence are seamless. They occur from paragraph to paragraph, without contextualisation or explanation. Stiller’s film attempts something similar. The actor-director deliberately blurs the lines between “reality” and Mitty’s daydreams. There are moments early on – notably Mitty jumping from a helicopter into the sea and confronting a shark – that we think he must be imagining, but that turn out to be “real”. The twist to Steve Conrad’s screenplay is that Mitty’s actual adventures eventually begin to eclipse his daydreams.

The film-makers throw in a McGuffin to provide an excuse for Mitty to travel. This is a missing photo taken by the legendary photographer Sean O’Connell (Sean Penn) that Mitty must retrieve in time to be used on Life’s final cover. This leads him on improbable trips to Greenland, Iceland (during a volcanic eruption) and eventually Afghanistan (where he offers some of his mother’s cake to the local warlords) in pursuit of Sean.

Shirley MacLaine is in enjoyably scatty form as Mitty’s eccentric mother, Edna. The scenes at the Life magazine offices, where the staff is being downsized to make way for the digital era, are well observed. Adam Scott excels as the bearded, obnoxious hatchet man, brought in to make redundancies. Wiig is very likable as single mom Cheryl, but is given little chance to demonstrate her own comic flair.

The film was shot on location in the places that Mitty visits. Stuart Dryburgh’s cinematography is frequently stunning: there are spectacular shots of snowy mountain peaks and of grassy steppes. What this Mitty lacks, though, is the zaniness you’d expect from a Ben Stiller film. Stiller himself is in a far gentler, less abrasive groove than in Zoolander or Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg. He has delivered a film that is pleasant, whimsical and just a little bland.