By Brian Viner

PUBLISHED: 17:13 EST, 26 December 2013 | UPDATED: 17:13 EST, 26 December 2013

The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty (PG)

Verdict: Enjoyable but flawed comedy

[reviewStars]

Much has been made of director Peter Jackson’s audacity in turning a children’s book, The Hobbit, into an epic movie trilogy. But Tolkien’s book still ran to 300 pages.

American humorist James Thurber, by  contrast, took barely 2,000 words to tell The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty when it appeared in the New Yorker magazine in 1939.

And it has inspired not one film — the  celebrated 1947 version with Danny Kaye,  which propelled the name ‘Walter Mitty’ into the English language — but two.

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A Walter Mitty character was originally a harmless day-dreamer, who disengages from the real world by turning his small everyday failures and humiliations into grandiose fantasies, with himself cast as the hero. But over the years the name has acquired a more pejorative  sense, coming to mean a self-deluding, self-aggrandising fraudster, who tries to gain respect by pretending to be something he’s not.

The British Army has even institutionalised the name. A regular soldier who pretends to be in the SAS, or who wants to be in the SAS only so that he can boast about it, is known as  a ‘Walt’.

This is rather a shame, for there was nothing deceitful, still less boastful, about the original Walter Mitty.

In this re-working of Thurber’s story,  directed by, co-produced by and starring Ben Stiller, the original meaning is happily restored, more or less.

Stiller’s Walter is not a henpecked husband, as Thurber intended and Danny Kaye’s was, but a mild-mannered fellow trying to use an internet dating site to hook up with a female colleague he admires from across the office floor, but cannot  summon the courage to approach  in person.

Meanwhile, his domestic life revolves around his elderly mother (a twinkly Shirley MacLaine).

He is trying to re-house her, but when it seems that she may have to live with him for a while, she asks: ‘I won’t be cramping your scene?’ The sad truth is that Walter has no scene to cramp. 

So, instead, he has fantasies. He imagines a long life with his attractive but seemingly out-of-reach colleague Cheryl (Kristen Wiig) — cue a mad but very funny passage in which they sit in contented old age on a porch, with him as a baby, having aged backwards like Benjamin Button.

Walter and Cheryl work for Life magazine, which stopped production years ago and has been resuscitated here only to close it again.

A comically unpleasant executive (Adam Scott) has been brought in to oversee redundancies and he makes Walter his whipping boy, to which Mitty responds by fantasising about insulting and then beating up his new boss. In his ever-vivid imagination, their confrontation begins with a fight over an old toy, a rubber doll called Stretch Armstrong.

Reality is not so satisfying, alas.  Walter manages Life’s photo negative department, and the bullying gets worse when it appears he has lost  the negative required for the final front cover.

The picture has been sent in by a macho roving photographer called Sean O’Connell (Sean Penn, at his most rugged), with whom Walter has dealt for years, but never met.

So, in a fusion of his real life and  his fantasy life, he sets off in search  of O’Connell, an adventure that  takes him to Greenland, Iceland  and Afghanistan.

This enables Stiller the director to plot a series of dramatic set-pieces that stretch credibility (a buddy,  perhaps, for Stretch Armstrong), but are never less than enjoyable. The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty is fun on the whole, but in that phrase beloved of football pundits, it loses its way in the final third. The problem is that Stiller becomes less Walter Mitty and more Phileas Fogg.

If Thurber was dissatisfied with the Danny Kaye film version (which he was, coincidentally registering his displeasure in a letter to Life magazine), he would be downright bewildered this time.

There is plenty to admire, and Stiller is a fine comic actor who  pulls off the transformation from nerd to hero, but he has created a Hollywood classic only in the outer reaches of his own imagination.

All Is Lost (12A)

Verdict: Thriller with real depth

Rating:

In All Is Lost, Robert Redford plays just the sort of character Walter Mitty might picture himself to be: A resourceful and resilient solo yachtsman battling what appear to be insurmountable odds in the Indian Ocean.

It is a role that requires as much courage from the actor as from the unnamed man he plays.

Redford is on his own throughout and has scarcely any dialogue but for a voice-over at the beginning, a melancholic farewell to his family and a single swear word bellowed when all, indeed, seems to be lost.

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He therefore has to act his thoughts, which he does with amazing conviction.

It is a masterly performance, as elemental in its way as the stuff nature keeps throwing at him, and if it does bag him another Oscar nomination at the age of 77, it will be richly deserved.

Huge credit, too, belongs to writer-director J. C. Chandor, who had the  vision and persuasive powers to get financial backing for a screenplay that must have looked like a magazine insert.

He generates genuine tension, yet never relies on orchestral manoeuvres in the deep.

The music is restrained, in fact, and the score comes from other things — wind, rain, creaks, groans, sighs — while the boat itself keens a kind of woodwind lament.

The boat is a 39-footer, which is disastrously holed by a drifting container. Our man carries out some decent makeshift repairs, but is finally worn down by the combined effects of relentless sun, ever-dwindling supplies and, above all, violent storms presaged by distant thunder that we hear with almost as much dread as he does.

It is Chandor’s triumph, and Redford’s, that even those of us whose nautical adventures are restricted to the odd choppy  Channel crossing can’t help but imagine ourselves in such a pickle.

As with Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours, another tale of unlikely survival, watching the film becomes almost an exercise in self-examination. How would I cope? Would I stay that calm?

All Is Lost has imperfections, some of them forced by the narrative. In reality, Redford’s character would surely wear sunglasses, but we need to see his eyes. No matter.

It warrants a strong recommendation for sheer originality alone, and the reminder that Redford, now he’s no longer such a pretty face, never was just that. He really is a very fine actor indeed.