Monday 16 February 2015

Movie: 'The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty' (2013)

Dangerous though it is to write in the heat of the moment, and while aware of the film-centric bias this blog has taken in recent months, there is no recent movie more worthy of a post than 'The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty'. It wasn't received well at the time, which is mystifying, but then when have critics ever been perfect or anything other than just as fallible as anyone else with a pair of eyes and some fingers to write with? It annoys me that they follow critical trends like lemmings over a cliff, but what can you do about it?

The redemptive streak of the Quirky Muffin continues. Apparently there is a burning desire to compensate for horrid injustices heaped on thoroughly undeserving films. 'Mitty' is a movie that is thoroughly well made, artfully directed by its star, Ben Stiller, and lacking in any major flaws. Why didn't it do better? It's a curious question, with not many answers to be found. Maybe people were expecting an outright comedy instead of a fairly light mood piece? Perhaps a movie with almost no violence and no gunplay doesn't have an audience any more? I write that last one in the wake of watching 'Guardians of the Galaxy' and 'Captain America: The Winder Soldier', both of which left piles of bodies in their narrative wakes and bullet casings by the mountain load. It was sickening to see so many bullets shot in 'Winter Soldier', but that's a sidetrack best left untrammelled. We shall return to 'Mitty', which had one extended fantasy chase/fight sequence but nothing else particularly violent although there was plenty of 'action'. It's actually a pretty sweet film, and a throwback on many levels. Could that be it? Did the curse of the 'throwback movie' strike? I love throwbacks, and not just because of nostalgia! Stylisation and plot accounts for a lot of it, especially here.

The story of 'The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty' is that of a man, a manager of photographic negatives at a soon to close magazine, and his quest to track down the maverick photographer whose magical last cover photo negative is missing from the reel he sent in. Mitty the character is a buttoned down, risk-averse, nerd who is infatuated with a woman who has just started at work, and day dreams spontaneously and with great focus and imagination in place of actually living his life. It's only when he loses his job over the missing negative and goes on the quest that... Well, that would be telling. Curiously I had a chance to see this film on a ferry crossing once and refused thinking it would be a stupid comedy. It's an easy mistake to make when you consider some of Stiller's other films, but he also always has an air of dangerous intelligence that forbids you from writing him off. Plus, he's Jerry Stiller's son and therefore has unpredictability in his blood.

Points of interest in 'Mitty' include a great choice of modern and classic pop standards for the soundtrack, some gorgeous photography of Greenland, Iceland and wherever the Afghanistan sequences were filmed, a great ensemble cast featuring Stiller, the extremely beautiful Kristen Wiig, a slightly misused Adam Scott and Kathryn Hahn, Patton Oswalt and the mighty Sean Penn, and finally an excellent integration of Mitty's fantasy sequences into the film. Those fantasy sequences are the only links to the original short story from many decades ago, and in this case are actually very inventive and put some action into the film where it might be needed and contrast with the real life action effectively. Putting all that aside, though it is definitely Ben Stiller's film and he pulls it off wonderfully. There's one dreamy sequence on a road in Iceland, about which more details will be withheld, for teasing's sake. It's not very often that you tumble across a good natured mood tale of a film, and I'm glad this one came through. It's certainly the most cohesive and self-consistent new film I've seen since 'Premium Rush', built to entertain, enthral and stun with scenery, and the romance even works. It's hard to NOT be romantic once you've seen Iceland, in all probability!

Perhaps outside the heat of the moment this film will be re-evaluated but it has about it the defining marks of something to be rewatched many times, and to repeatedly feel good about. (Please pardon the dangling preposition!) Plus, it has sharks and skateboards, so how can it be bad? Really? Oh, the world makes no sense!

O.

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