I am not a big Ben Stiller fan, but I DO enjoy many of his movies. With that as background, I went into watching this one with a bit of apprehension, but overall I found this to be one of the better movies I have seen recently. And I see about 250 a year.
The story here is based on LIFE magazine, known since the 1800s as a weekly magazine with an emphasis on photojournalism. Many of the covers are iconic. It ceased to be a weekly in 1972, and has been published in various forms since then. Now we are seeing the days leading up to its final cover, the magazine going solely on-line.
Ben Stiller is mild-mannered Walter Mitty, based on James Thurber's 1939 short story, "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty", about a man who had a very vivid fantasy life. In this movie he is turning 42 as a new manager comes in to see that the operation of publishing LIFE magazine gets shut down orderly and people are fired. But Mitty is the manager of "negative assets", the man who for years has received, examined, and cataloged photo negatives that come in, including those chosen for the covers.
Walter is single and lonely and joins an online matchmaking service, and he has his eye on pretty and sweet Kristen Wiig as new LIFE employee, Cheryl Melhoff. (Her character's name is a tribute to Walter Mithoff, the real person that inspired Thurber to name his Mitty character.) But he has an ongoing difficulty getting things going.
Another key character is played by Sean Penn as a famous but very elusive professional photographer. He sends some negatives and tells that "negative 25" is an iconic image and it should be used for the last LIFE cover. But when Walter examines all the images, frame #25 is missing. That prompts him to set out to find the photographer and ultimately image #25. This leads him to such places as Greenland, Iceland, and the Himalayas.
One of the things that makes this movie so enjoyable, and my wife echoed this sentiment, Stiller and Wiig do not play comedic characters, their roles are serious but sweet. So the whole movie has many humorous parts in it, but done in a very entertaining way. Also directed by Ben Stiller.
SPOILERS: So Walter Mitty gets to live out adventures that perhaps are even better than his fantasy life, and in the end he does get the girl. When he finds the photographer, in the Himalayas, he tells Walter the image was inside the inscribed wallet he gave Walter. It had been thrown into mom's (Shirley MacLaine) garbage in frustration but she retrieved it. Inside was the negative, which became the image for the final issue. It was a photo of Walter himself sitting outside the TIME building, looking at a contact sheet of negatives, doing his job for the magazine.
July 2023 edit: I just watched it again after 9 years. I enjoyed it, found much of it fresh, but I lowered my rating one point, it isn't quite as good as I remembered it, as compared to other movies I have watched.
The story here is based on LIFE magazine, known since the 1800s as a weekly magazine with an emphasis on photojournalism. Many of the covers are iconic. It ceased to be a weekly in 1972, and has been published in various forms since then. Now we are seeing the days leading up to its final cover, the magazine going solely on-line.
Ben Stiller is mild-mannered Walter Mitty, based on James Thurber's 1939 short story, "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty", about a man who had a very vivid fantasy life. In this movie he is turning 42 as a new manager comes in to see that the operation of publishing LIFE magazine gets shut down orderly and people are fired. But Mitty is the manager of "negative assets", the man who for years has received, examined, and cataloged photo negatives that come in, including those chosen for the covers.
Walter is single and lonely and joins an online matchmaking service, and he has his eye on pretty and sweet Kristen Wiig as new LIFE employee, Cheryl Melhoff. (Her character's name is a tribute to Walter Mithoff, the real person that inspired Thurber to name his Mitty character.) But he has an ongoing difficulty getting things going.
Another key character is played by Sean Penn as a famous but very elusive professional photographer. He sends some negatives and tells that "negative 25" is an iconic image and it should be used for the last LIFE cover. But when Walter examines all the images, frame #25 is missing. That prompts him to set out to find the photographer and ultimately image #25. This leads him to such places as Greenland, Iceland, and the Himalayas.
One of the things that makes this movie so enjoyable, and my wife echoed this sentiment, Stiller and Wiig do not play comedic characters, their roles are serious but sweet. So the whole movie has many humorous parts in it, but done in a very entertaining way. Also directed by Ben Stiller.
SPOILERS: So Walter Mitty gets to live out adventures that perhaps are even better than his fantasy life, and in the end he does get the girl. When he finds the photographer, in the Himalayas, he tells Walter the image was inside the inscribed wallet he gave Walter. It had been thrown into mom's (Shirley MacLaine) garbage in frustration but she retrieved it. Inside was the negative, which became the image for the final issue. It was a photo of Walter himself sitting outside the TIME building, looking at a contact sheet of negatives, doing his job for the magazine.
July 2023 edit: I just watched it again after 9 years. I enjoyed it, found much of it fresh, but I lowered my rating one point, it isn't quite as good as I remembered it, as compared to other movies I have watched.