Arghh!  I am one of those apparently odd people who think that if an idea is developed for one medium (short story) and is brought over to another (movie) it should retain its core narrative, structure and characters.  I get it that somethings have to be changed, multiple characters compressed into one, locales changed, music added, but jeez!  You wouldn’t take the Nutcracker ballet and present it as the Nutcracker movie while turning the toys into murderous little gnomes.  (Well of course, some would.)

Ben Stiller‘s  The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is gorgeously photographed.  The location shots in Iceland  could have been published in National Geographic.  I wanted to drop everything and go.  The visual effects were very realistic and well done.  Kristen Wiig, acting in a supporting role as Mitty’s love interest is good, several other small roles are nicely drawn, particularly the karaoke singing, inebriated helicopter pilot, Ólafur Darri Ólafsson.  Shirley MacLaine and Sean Penn are quite convincing as mother and adventure photographer, respectively.   Ben Stiller, not so much.  I have to say I’ve never been much taken with him and his goofy won’t-grow-up guy roles, and this didn’t improve things.  His mousy, archivist persona kept disappearing behind his intense, blue-eyed warrior look — and not always it seemed to me, in the proper scenes.

The big problem for me is that Thurber’s  “Walter Mitty” was an unreconstructed dreamer, escaping from his overbearing wife and his dull life.  All the action was a fantasy.  All!  Stiller and his writer, Steve Conrad,  choose to change this to a man who starts out as someone who ‘zones out’ a lot  but who,  somewhere in the middle, switches to a true action hero.  Though of course, we who think this is a Walter Mitty story keep waiting for the action to end and the shy little man to reappear.  Even at the end I thought, OK, now he’ll be back with his budget keeping and exhausted air. Nope.  He survives his impossible adventures and gets the girl. Very odd.

Beyond that I found the exchanges between Stiller and Wiig often to be awkward and cringe inducing.  ‘He’s not really going to do that, is he?’  His outbursts of boldness when trying to engage her were, at least in the beginning, too out of character.  He is after a mild mannered guy.  He wouldn’t halt her in her tracks with a loud salutation.  The adventure scenes by and large picked me up and kept my attention.  His adventure into the Himalayas was very good, however improbable.  But these were interrupted by confusion about who he was, milquetoast or manly man.  My engagement faltered; I wondered how much longer to the end.  The visual effects of the Benjamen Button transformation in which Stiller is small and old, are quite amazing but seem a very odd tangent — something done because it could be done, not because it added to the characters or story. Another case of narrātiō interruptus.

So for me there are some things to enjoy, mostly the landscapes and some eccentric human beings in Iceland and Afghanistan. The bits of slap-stick humor tickled me, though to be honest not as much as the ladies in the next row over. The warping of the story not so much, and Ben Stiller, still not.

 Maybe the movie could have been titled “Walter Mitty, Not the Original” or”Walter Mitty, Super Hero,” something so we know, and know the film makers know, their conception is not just a horse of a different color, it’s a zebra.