The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013)

Credit: New Line Cinema

If I watch a movie in the theater and I don’t rush home as fast as my lame car can take me, then I typically won’t end up writing a review. It’s not out of laziness. I’d say it’s a form of motion picture attention deficit disorder, where if I let it linger too long, then the words vanish from my mind. After watching The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, well actually during it, that’s one of the moments where I wish I had a laptop with me to let the words flow out as quickly as they appear in my mind. Is that even something a person can do?  Are you allowed to even write a review in the theater? I’ve wondered how critics like Roger Ebert would compose their work. Perhaps they sit in the very back and compose their reviews, or at least notes, away from other people who might be bothered by a lit screen in a darkened theater. I digress.

The trailer for Walter Mitty is one that instantly captured my imagination. I feel like my imagination runs wild like Mitty’s, so this is a movie I needed to see. Let me take a step back and actually explain who Walter Mitty is before I let my imagination get too side-tracked. Ben Stiller plays the title character, who day dreams frequently, and it often leaves him looking like a fool to those around him. He shuts down into a comatose-like state during his dreams and co-workers often throw things at him, mocking the poor guy. Now it’s not just Walter’s frequent dreaming that makes him relatable to me, it turns out that this movie opens with Walter logging into a dating website. I’ve recently done the same as Walter and I am even in the same predicament, with a barren profile that has left me questioning what I’m even doing on this site in the first place. Walter’s problem is that he’s smitten by a co-worker which he overheard is on this particular dating site, so he logged on to contact her, yet he is unable to “wink.” He called the dating service and spoke to Todd, a customer service representative whom he talks to throughout the movie, and who’s also played perfectly by Patton Oswalt. The co-worker in question is Kirsten Wiig’s character, Cheryl, who is absolutely adorable in this role. Walter’s foil at the magazine where he works is an executive named Ted, who has a god awful beard that looks like he glued strips of felt to his face. Ted’s hair is also perfectly styled into a pompadour, making him look so douchetastic that I want to tighten my hand into a fist and punch that smug guy. Walter actually gets to do just that in an awesome daydream sequence that is filmed better than many recent action movies I’ve seen.

 

Walter doesn’t just daydream that he’s in an action movie; one daydream about Cheryl actually spoofs The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which had me howling with laughter. Another daydream uses David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” and that song appears to be a theme for the movie. The brilliance of Walter Mitty is that the movie starts out with a clear division of his fantasies and what’s actually happening, and then by the middle of the movie I was completely fooled if what I had seen was real or another fantasy. At that point I couldn’t wait to see who had directed this amazing film; was it some indie film director that was unknown to me or a major, award-winning, caliber filmmaker? As soon as the credits rolled I was shocked. The director is actually the movie’s star, Ben Stiller. He has outdone himself with Walter Mitty, both as an actor and a director, and anything that references Sesame Street, David Bowie, and The Outsiders was already a winner in my eyes.

I think maybe I lingered too long in writing this review, because while it was happening I had so many wonderful things to say, yet now the words are escaping me. Maybe I’m more manic than I am plagued with an attention deficit disorder, as so many thoughts are racing through my head about Walter Mitty. I knew I was going to love this before I stepped into the theater, but in the back of my head there was doubt because I overheard it wasn’t given the best of reviews. Well, that’s the problem with movie critics. Many seem to be just like the uptight executive Ted character, lacking their sense of wonder or imagination. I think this movie is made for the dreamers of the world; it’s upbeat and whimsical and very humorous. It spoke to me on a level far beyond many movies, and it struck a chord; now it's up to me whether I continue to dream or I decide to make a difference.