Not Really the Ogden Nash Walter Mitty

Rating: 6/10 (24 January 2014)

"The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" is problematical. The cinematography is extraordinary. The movie is a travelogue taking the viewer to remote and scenic places.
Mitty departs from the short story written by Ogden Nash in almost every way possible. The original Mitty was married to a carping spouse who had no patience for his day dreaming. Ben Stiller's Mitty is a single man who works at Life Magazine where he is charge of the inventory of film negatives. Stiller's Mitty, like the original, drifts into elaborate fantasies. He is, in real life, a quiet, invisible corporate drone who does his job and lives a quiet life.
The pacing and tone of this movie is inconsistent, which is usually the fault of the editor. At times, it feels like a drama; sometimes, it is comedic. One would expect this story to be a poignant comedy, like the short story. Instead, the film tries to make Witty into an action hero.
The script is illogical in important ways that detract from the story. Witty's quest, for most of the film, is to find a lost negative. He travels to Greenland, Iceland and climbs into the Himalayas to find the man who shot the photograph he lost. When he finally locates the object of his quest, he chooses not to look at it. Who, in the human race, does that?
Another plot problem occurs when he travels to Iceland where he is present for the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, an eruption which disrupted air traffic around the world and caused temperatures to drop around the globe. Witty goes to the edge of the volcano, but gets a ride away from the eruption. A few hours later, he is at a Papa John's Pizza some miles away from the volcano. He calls his girl, but he says relatively little about the eruption. There is no volcanic dust, and no one seems to be troubled by the thing that just happened.
The principal parts were consistently underacted, creating a flat emotional tone running through the movie. The flat tone stood in contrast to death-defying events. Kristen Wig and Stiller appeared to be mirror images of each other's emotional tone - both extremely under acting.
There were some very funny scenes. The bit with eHarmony paid off nicely, and Patton Oswald added laughs.
The ending was predictable as the conflicts resolved quickly into a romance that had been foreshadowed from the first minutes of the film.
I didn't hate it. The music and the photography worked. There were flashes of brilliance and humor in the script, but the story did not hold together at important moments. There should have been some difference between Wig and Stiller's character styles. It was a mistake to have them mirror each other.