Life

Reality check

THE Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a whimsical tale of a middle-aged serial fantasist who must struggle to make his real life live up to his daydreams.

This central premise is just about all it shares with the all-singing all-dancing Danny Kaye version and indeed James Thurber's original short story.

Walter (Ben Stiller) used to be cool. As a teen, he was a skateboarding punk rocker with plans to travel across Europe - until his dad died suddenly, making Walter the family bread-winner.

Instead of going to Europe, he began working a series of blue-collar jobs that slowly turned him into a boring everyday Joe.

The 40-something Mitty has finally got a decent job working in the pun-tastic 'negative assets' department of Life magazine - he selects and processes photos for the covers and layouts, when not daydreaming about his cute co-worker Cheryll (Kirsten Wiig) whom he admires from afar via an online dating service.

Though this film exists in a world where the iconic American publication apparently did not cease to exist well over a decade ago, we meet Mitty just as his livelihood is under threat from Life's imminent 'transition' to the online realm.

The process is being overseen by bearded corporate fat-cutter Tedd (Adam Scott), a sharp-suited jerk in charge of 'streamlining' the print edition.

He takes an instant dislike to Walter, who 'spaces out' mid-conversation while entertaining violent fantasies about destroying him in superhero-style battle. When Walter loses the negative for the cover shot of the last ever issue of Life as supplied to him by their enigmatic star snapper Sean O'Connell (Sean Penn), he jeopardises his already shaky job and any chance of setting up a "Pina Colada Song thing" (as in the 1979 hit by Rupert Holmes) with fellow eHarmony hopeful Cheryll.

Thus, the second half of the film finds Walter embarking on an adventure-packed quest to find the man behind the missing cover shot.

While we're never sure how much of Walter's helicopter jumping, sea-faring, volcano surfing, mountain climbing antics are really 'real', the cinematography (by Stuart Dryburgh) employed to capture his fantastic quest through Greenland, Iceland and 'ungoverned Afghanistan' is so spectacular that you won't really care too much about how plausible Walter's actions are.

Besides, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a comedy at heart: all the action set pieces are played for laughs as well as excitement, tallying nicely with an abundance of subtle visual jokes and a sharp script by Steve Conrad fuelled by the frustrations of a modern age where tactile analogue technology has been swept away by the coolly impersonal sheen of the digital revolution. The whole film is steeped in a wistful nostalgia for simpler times, in step with the titular character's existential crisis.

Again, this seeps on to the screen through the bold pop-art styling of the Life offices and the abundance of 1970s and 80s vehicles which seem to populate the streets of Walter Mitty's New York.

The 'message' of Stiller's film might be standard Hollywood stuff - hold on to your dreams, life is for living - but the vehicle carrying it is anything but conventional.

A whimsical whirlwind of stunning visuals and funny business which blurs fantasy and reality at will, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is should definitely appeal to persons of a certain (middle) age.

While not everyone will have the patience for its two-and-a-bit hour flight of fancy, those who do will likely love every second.