Making The Scene.

Rating: 7/10 (18 October 2016)

Oh, how I dreaded watching this. There was Thurber's pat little short story of a nobody who is bossed around by everybody and who daydreams fiercely in order to compensate for his nothingess. It's just right for a short story. The boredom alternates with the adventure and it all ends on time and as it should. MGM had a crack at it back in the 40s with Danny Kaye, a full-length feature, and of course it didn't work. The fantasies didn't seem so funny on screen and were gotten out of the way in the first half hour to make room for a routine and funnier crime plot.
And now -- Hollywood presents another remake, no doubt filled with Ben Stiller's exploits in the world of computer-generated images. Ben Stiller as Man Mountain Dean conquering the Greys from outer space. Stiller besting Boulder Dam with legs and becoming Heavyweight Champion of the World. Stiller singlehandedly saving the planet from God only knows what pot pourri of gangsters, geological threats, and mad scientists. Explosions, roiling clouds of black smoke, swords thrust into torsos, groans of agony. I forced myself to watch it as penance for an impure thought I'd had as a one year old child.
But no. Stiller has directed Steve Conrad's screenplay with an eye to an audience above the Mental Age of twelve. Stiller is Mitty, not so much bored as socially ineffective, a little cowed by all the transactions taking place around him. He can't seem to get a hit on eHarmony. (Lots of product placement.) There are few fantasies and they're over with quickly. And he's trying to make his presence known to a colleague at the dying "Life Magazine," Kristen Wiig, who sometimes seems almost as uncertain of herself as Stiller is of himself.
Still, she inspires him. From a nobody with a nothing past, he leaps around the world in pursuit of the famous photographer who has taken the last and most earth-shaking photograph of his career for the final issue of "Life." Only the photographer seems to have forgotten to hand the negative over to Stiller, who is in charge of "Negative Assets." There's Iceland, Greenland, and Afghanistan, with people playing games you can't pronounce. As I remember from an anthropology course, one of the games shown on screen, a version of soccer, is far more tame than the description I read. But no matter.
It's Stiller's story, sometimes pensive, sometime quite amusing, about the rise in his blood testosterone level. It never goes out of bounds nor does the movie, which is in fact not bad at all.