A Pleasant Surprise

Rating: 8/10 (15 March 2015)

I had serious reservations about 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty'. I love the Thurber short story, and Danny Kaye's gloriously disloyal 1947 rendering of the tale on the big screen in equal measure - but find Ben Stiller too mannered a comic actor, in recent years, to be watchable. Too many trademark ticks and tricks in his emotional repertoire. While largely disregarding Thurber (and Kaye, though there a number of enjoyably OTT fantasy sequences - only one of which, a hokey Benjamin Button skit, seems redundant), I have to say that I was greatly impressed by this film. It is, in point of fact, one of the most beautiful pieces of cinema I've seen in a long time - the audience, like Mitty, discovering the glories of the world outside his glum, humdrum existence, a world he'd only witnessed in miniature, vicariously - and the landscapes of Greenland, Iceland and even New York are quite gloriously rendered (kudos to DP Stuart Dryburgh). Stiller's direction is confident, and the performances - including his own - are measured, restrained and all the more effective and affecting for that. I hate the term, but this is, at heart, a 'Feel-good' movie - and a thoughtful one, at that.