Look At Life

Rating: 6/10 (26 December 2013)

Ine James Thurber short story, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty runs to eight pages and a time-span of perhaps two or three hours tops during which Walter Mitty drives his wife to the hairdresser and whilst waiting to pick her up again buys a pair of overshoes and some puppy biscuits. The only location mentioned by name is Waterbury, presumably the one in Connecticut and if Walter or his unnamed wife have any combination of parents and/or siblings we are never told. During the course of the story Walter imagines he is the Commander of a navy hydroplane and guiding it through a hurricane, a surgeon who, before he can operate successfully on a millionaire patient, must first fix the 'anethsetizer' (which he does with a fountain pen), a crack shot on trial for murder, an intrepid World War One pilot, and finally, a man facing a firing squad. The sparse information supplied by Thurber clearly gives screenwriters carte blanche to do a little daydreaming themselves so here we have a Walter Mitty living with his mother and sister and employed by Life magazine where he has become enamored of a new employee in the shape of Kristen Wiig. Thurber began his story smack in the middle of Walter's first imaginary exploit, as he guides the hydroplane through the hurricane until his wife snaps his out of it by nagging that he is driving too fast. This sets Walter up as a hem-pecked husband and probably middle-aged because in ordering him to buy overshoes his wife tells him that he is no longer a young man. The point about the exploits provided by Thurber was that they were all imaginary whereas in this latest film adaptation (Danny Kaye played Mitty in 1947) Ben Stiller begins by imagining himself a hero but then moves on to do things technically possible - jumping into a helicopter as it is taking off, trekking for miles in inhospitable terrain and ultimately scaling a mountain - but highly improbable for an urban man more or less out of condition. Having said that the movie passes the time painlessly and Kristen Wiig is a vast improvement as a love-object than Virginia Mayo, who always looked like a cross between a hooker and a gangster's moll. Also, with Kaye you got music, notably his rendition of Anatole of Paris, a sophisticated number written by his wife, Sylvia Fine.