The expiring magazine is Walter’s secret Life.Īt the start, though, he is just a schlub with a furtive crush on his new Life colleague Cheryl Melhoff (Kristen Wiig). Stiller’s Mitty also goes on adventures, though of his own choosing: to find the photograph that will be on the cover of Life’s final print edition. Mitty works as an editor of pulp-fiction magazines, whose lurid tales fuel his reveries and a mysterious woman leads him into real-life exploits more extravagant than his wildest woolgatherings. The 1947 movie musical, starring Danny Kaye, took a half-step toward the new film. (READ: James Thurber’s story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” ) So meager and hopeless is Mitty’s life that his last daydream is of violent death. As his wife or a garage mechanic berates him, Mitty slips into five fantasy roles: a Navy Captain, a genius surgeon, a master criminal, a pilot on a suicide mission and, finally, a hero facing a firing squad. Thurber’s Mitty is a henpecked husband driving his wife to her weekly hair date in Waterbury, Conn.

The movie takes its title and little else from James Thurber‘s 2,079-word story published in The New Yorker 75 years ago next March. Anthony Lane, reviewing the film in The New Yorker, said it “keeps glancing backward, at the lost and the obsolete.” Exactly, and in a good way: Mitty pays tribute to people who cherish the past and, in the face of extinction, are devoted to preserving it.īeyond that, Mitty is a lovely romantic comedy - the portrait of a man, nearly swallowed by the gulf between the world his lives in and the world he dreams of, who manages to bridge the two and to find Ms.

But even people not named Corliss, people not involved in the endangered crafts of print journalism and photo curating, should be able to connect with the movie’s sweet and mournful tone. Mitty, directed by Stiller from Steve Conrad’s script, still could’ve stunk and it has its occasional longueurs. (READ: Mary and the Case of the Missing Film Stills ) For my wife and me, watching this movie was like sitting through our surprise dual biography, so many of its images triggering memories of poignancy or pleasure. Mitty’s job, now threatened, is to manage and care for the photographs of that great old publication Mary Corliss ran the Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archive for 34 years, and in 2002 she was abruptly let go, and that invaluable archive shuttered, after a four-and-a-half-month strike in which Mary played an important role.

is to be spun off from its parent corporation, Time Warner, some time next year. news publication - Life, not TIME - which is about to be taken over and downsized Time Inc. The main character, played by Ben Stiller, works in midtown Manhattan’s Time + Life Building, my business home for 33 years. Follow should almost disqualify myself from reviewing The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

Walter mitty story