“He who is most slow in making a promise is the most faithful in performance of it.”
-- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
-- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Stiller as Mitty The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a movie with high aspirations that falls just short. Its current 48% on Rotten Tomatoes is a bit too harsh, but it certainly could have been better with just a bit a more care. A movie too busy imagining a forest to plant any trees, Mitty moves from scene to scene a little too quickly, and doesn't take the time to fully explore their implications or meaning. Its mix of drama, comedy, and romance actually works quite well in modernizing the 1939 short story it is based on, which makes it that much more of a shame that it wasn't done with a more talented hand. Stiller is capable enough of guiding us through the movie, but he doesn't have the flair for this sort of haughty-but-serious story (his previous directorial experience, at least in feature films, has all come in pure comedies). There's a lot more meat to this story that Stiller doesn't bite off, quickly passing to the next scene where he can show dramatic emotion. Had Stiller consigned himself to starring and brought in a capable director, say, in a dream scenario Woody Allen, or more likely someone like the tandem of Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, really anyone who would've spent a little less time on scenes like Mitty longboarding down an Icelandic road, and a little more time delving into his "zone outs" and how they relate to his maturation (this is sort a of mid-life coming-of-age film, after all) this movie could have been truly great.
Wiig as Melhoff Stiller directed and co-produced the movie, besides starring as Mitty. Perhaps that's why he appears to have so little energy for the character. In trying to shed his comedic image, Stiller buttons himself down a little too much here, not injecting any life into the character who even just before the credits rolls seems like a timid man who's been through a crazy couple weeks, rather than a man changed by the experiences. Kristen Wiig takes a break from comedy (the humor of the movie isn't in her scenes) to play Cheryl Melhoff, Mitty's co-worker and love interest. She's asked to do very little beyond be so obviously interested in Mitty from the start that his obliviousness is distractingly unbelievable. Patton Oswalt stars briefly as Todd, an eHarmony (no doubt paying in part for the movie's production) employee tasked with beefing up Mitty's profile through phone conversations, but try as he might, his part is flat and his recurring role of "being hung up on by Mitty" gets old fast. Cheryl and Todd do a bit too much fawning over Mitty, enthralled with a man who frankly, isn't that interesting, the sort of creative misstep that can happen when the same man guiding the production is also playing the main character.
Penn as O'Connell Sean Penn obviously enjoyed his small role as the free-spirited photographer Sean O'Connell, who sets Mitty's transformation in motion, but he has one scene, and the dialogue between himself and Mitty is less than satisfying. This is Walter's new idol, a man he's always respected, but he seems to show no interest in explaining himself to O'Connell so that a perceived slight can be rectified. The socially awkward Mitty should've been falling all over himself to ensure O'Connell wasn't insulted, especially as his lifestyle inspires Mitty to take more chances and the loss of one of his photographic negatives gives Mitty the impetus for his adventure. Either way, the movie could've been improved by giving Penn more to do, or even just exploring his character more. How does one get to be a photographer who straps himself onto airplanes to take pictures of a volcanic eruption before jetting around the globe to photograph a snow leopard? What sort of living is in that? We definitely could've taken a bit out the airplane flight montages to talk a bit more about Penn's charismatic photographer.
Stiller as Mitty The movie suffers from plenty of plot holes Stiller is either too disinterested or too inexperienced to deal with. From giving Melhoff several Pashto words to Google for him without spelling them, to miraculously knowing her address (for the sake of his credentials as a protagonist, let's assume he wasn't stalking her), to Mitty being discouraged when a man refers to Melhoff by the pet name "honey", which is brushed aside later without any explanation for why a man she was previously involved with would call her that when not involved with her, there's plenty here to argue for a slower pace that could've resolved these minor issues. Though those are just a few examples, this type of carelessness with his product pervades Stiller's Walter Mitty. Perhaps if Stiller hadn't stretched himself so thin with multiple duties on the film, it would've been better. The lofty ideas and talented cast are all here for a great movie; it's in the execution that it falls by the wayside into just above-average.
A movie that gets its rating almost entirely from premise and ideas and not from execution
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