This is not a movie that should have worked, and looking at Rotten Tomatoes, many of the critics did not think it did (though 3/4 of the viewers liked it). It's not a great film. 12 Years a Slave was a great film...which I nonetheless hated, coming away from it from feeling empty and manipulated. In contrast, I was deeply moved by Walter Mitty, profoundly more so than that other, Important Film. I came out of Walter Mitty feeling a genuine sense of uplift and wellness, which, though it didn't really track with the content, was actually there.
The film is loosely based on a wisp of a story by James Thurber (which, despite being an undergrad English Major, and despite "Walter Mitty" being a cultural shorthand for a big-dreaming little-man, I never read until today). The movie begins with Walter Mitty, a "negatives assets" worker (there are two in his department) at LIFE Magazine, on the day it has been acquired and is being turned into an online-only product. The usual corporate white-collared goons come in from the head office to execute the unfit (they all, inexplicably, have beards), with the lead, Ted Hendricks, being played by Adam Scott (who I loved in Tell Me You Love Me). That's happening as Mitty has been smitten by Cheryl Melhoff (Kristin Wiig), who is a recent divorcee, and newly employed at LIFE. As the film opens, Mitty is trying to "wink" her through eHarmony, and is being shut down by the site for not having done enough with his life. Whence he meets Todd, the helpful customer service rep who befriends Walter and acts as an appreciative fan through the film.
The plot pivots around the missing "negative 25", sent to Walter for the last cover of LIFE by the famous and maverick photographer, Sean O'Connell. Cheryl plants the seed to go seek out O'Connell (played by a beautifully scruffy Sean Penn), which he does, with a trip to Iceland and then Afghanistan. He returns, settles scores with Hendricks, and gets the girl.
It shouldn't work, at all.
So how does it work? Well, let me lay out the ways I don't think it works.
Number one: Ben Stiller is not the right actor to play Thurber's Walter. You look in his face and it's not that of a beaten down everyman. The vacuity of Derek Zoolander insouciant mug is gone. There's depth, history, strength, and self-awareness. He's not broken and he knows what is going on in the world around him, and what people are, and (essentially) how to engage them. He daydreams, true, but they are not the pathetic compensations of a man who is at heart a coward. That's not Walter's heart, which is clear from very early on in the film. He's not looking out at the world through a fog of failure and weakness. There's already a strength and perceptiveness in him from the beginning. Therefore he's not a believable Walter Mitty, as Thurber portrayed him.
Secondly, the setup: Small man discovers his Bigness by facing and overcoming trials of strength and courage, and winning the girl. Well, in a sense that's the Hero's Journey, so that's OK, as a structure, but dangerously trite. If it was done more straight, with earnestness on the part of the film, it would have been treacly awfulness.
Third, the Other Places and Other People as Route to Awakening. That could have also been painfully done. Really painfully. I tend to avoid these film premises, so nothing comes to mind immediately as an example. But the thought of the Wise Native makes me start gagging like a cat with a hair ball. (Please don't go all Avatar, either. In that film, it's the half-breed that saves the natives.)
But with all that, why does it work and how does it work?
I think Stiller's goal is essentially to present the feeling of the state of self-integration as a tone. It's that state which Mitty solidifies through facing himself, via following through with his quest. Stiller doesn't seem to care to present a map of the way there, in its details. Unlike, perhaps, some 60's story of travel to India to find enlightenment, Stiller is not saying, "Here's how you have to do it." He doesn't care about presenting a "credible" portrait of the journey that Mitty is on. He's not bound to Mitty as the Thurber or the quest structure would seem to define the character. Mitty, once moving (which, I'd argue, is from the moment he pushes Cheryl's "wink" button), is real, engaged, with depth, and with a power of his choices. He doesn't waffle when he chooses. Even in the bar, in Iceland, deciding not to go with the drunken helicopter pilot is not a craven choice. It's actually quite rational and understandable not to go over a frozen body of water with a man you just met, who will likely pass out at the control of a several ton machine suspended off a whirligig. That scene does not match with a character who is supposed to be a weak, ineffectual, daydreamy man. His choice to go is not, then, overcoming cowardice, but rather, embracing audaciousness and chance. That's very different.
Mitty's journey is not so much a depiction of transformation, as of coming out of pause mode (begun as a kind of shock reaction to his father dying when he was young).
So, if Stiller is not presenting a real depiction of transformation, or a map to courage and change, then why has he not failed? If he uses cliched structures and plot devices, why does the movie not feel hackneyed and unearned?
Because, again, I don't think that's his intention. The secondary characters--Cheryl, the helicopter pilot, Hernando the other negative assets guy, Todd at eHarmony, even Bearded Corporate Lackey--are too full and have too many moments that point to (even if not fleshed out) inner lives, which are not pre-programmed by the film's overt conventions. There's too much interiority to these characters, who should, if the external structures (of quest, transformation, seeking-the-girl) be shells or ciphers, organized around Mitty. But they're not.
Instead, the film gives a series of events, characters, and locations which are all tonally consistent. The beautiful mountains of Afghanistan, the starkly sumptuous Iceland and the rugged space of Greenland; the quirky foreigners and sailors; the fighting of a shark without totally freaking out; skate boarding down a scary-steep road; outrunning a volcano. They are all underlay by a tone, like a subliminal musical drone that colors all the overt notes, which, although those notes may adhere to a certain "melodic" structure, are fundamentally changed by the foundational harmonic, being the integration of the self with itself.
The encounter with Sean O'Connell is the keystone of this. O'Connell should be the Wise Man on the Mountain. He's a man of the Old Ways (he still shoots on film, is geographically enigmatic, and is unconcerned with money), who Mitty, literally stumbles over on top of a mountain, laying in wait to photograph the rare snow leopard (referencing Peter Mathiasson's book, The Snow Leopard, about a quest for enlightenment symbolized by the leopard). The potential for rank kitsch is breathtaking. Yet O'Connell is played, and directed, as an actual man, with his own particular interior that is not beholden to the external trappings of the character, but who is real, spontaneous, and wise in his way, without being a cloying prick about it. He does not represent what should be striven for. Rather, he's another of the film's elaborations on the felt quality of a state.
So, that's all why The Secret Life of Walter Mitty works, because it's not about what it looks like it's about. Rather, it's a series and collection of "carrier melodies," that allow for that underlying drone to be communicated, the tone of the state of self-integration, of an interior self that matches an exterior self. The trappings are not the point. The beautiful scenery and the foreigners in foreign lands are not the point. The point is to have two hours of exposure to a state, which is your state, which is what the felt-sense of that integration is. That's why it works.
No comments:
Post a Comment