The
reviews for Ben Stiller’s THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY are
embarrassing. Not for Ben Stiller, or
the movie itself, but for the critics who wrote them. More on that in just a second.
To
begin, I love and have always loved Thurber’s original short story: a
henpecked, mediocre married man dreams of being anyone but himself, and at the
story’s end (the entire action covers maybe a half hour of his life) he dreams
of his own execution. The story is funny
and sad, the illustrations are wonderful, and the premise is (I assume)
universal – we all wish to be something other than what we are, at least at
times. Thurber’s story is about a man
who will never do anything other than that.
The
film was adapted for the screen in 1947, and starred Danny Kaye. The film took the conceit of the original
short story (an ineffectual man daydreams of being something other than what he
is instead of pursuing life) and used it to tell a story about a man who
finally ends up in a life like his dreams and is fundamentally changed for the
better. How is that movie remembered
nowadays? Empire listed it as one of the 500 best movies of all time.
Cut
to 2013, where the Kaye film has been loosely remade, after several decades of
false starts, by Ben Stiller, who also stars in it. The Stiller film wisely uses the premise of
the Kaye film and tells a contemporary story with it, but in effect the logline
is the same: a man finally ends up in a life like his dreams and is
fundamentally changed for the better.
They even kept the dream girl aspect of the Kaye film without resorting
to the modern cliché of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. What they abandoned is the misogynistic
element of a shrewish wife (the original short story) or a shrewish mother (the
Kaye film) and replaced it with a well-thought out internal obstacle.
So
imagining that all else is equal, how is this one being received? Metacritic shows 54, “mixed or average
reviews.” This isn’t what makes me angry
– I don’t pretend that everyone needs to be on the same page about what makes a
movie great or terrible. While I don’t
believe that all opinions are equal except in the most basic sense (this should
be obvious: the opinion that Citizen Kane is a landmark achievement in cinema
is empirically a better opinion that the opinion that Citizen Kane is a
propaganda machine for our reptilian shapeshifter overlords), the kinds of things that Stiller’s film is
being criticized for belies a tragedy of our culture; namely, that if we exalt
the potential of the human spirit, we are being childish.
Well,
fuck you.
Let’s
look at some of the negative reviews.
From The Guardian: “It’s too
airless, too perfect, a dream of connection with humanity that flees contact
with actual people.” Let’s work backward
from that. There are only a handful of
characters in the film (Mitty is in every single scene, often alone), and each
one of them is recognizable in the world where we live. Mitty’s sister is a flaky aspiring actress,
yes, but also a kindhearted person who is there for her family as much as she
can be, and given the fact that Walter became the family’s protector at such a
young age, we understand why she would end up that way. Mitty’s mother is a caring, devoted mother
who relates to the people around her in totemistic ways: her box of Walter’s “stuff,”
the piano from her husband, and this culminates in a simple but important act
of remembrance late in Act 3. Kristen
Wiig’s character, Walter’s intended love interest, is perhaps the most grounded
person Ms. Wiig has ever played. Her Shelby
(outside of the self in Walter’s fantasies) is a woman with a son she cares
about and is trying to raise as a responsible young man, a slightly messy
relationship with her son’s father that is not over-the-top in its
tragedy. The “magical mentor” character,
played by Sean Penn (who has only a single scene) is actually a person. His extraordinary traits are linked to his
career (either as a product of them or a reason for choosing that career or,
likely, both), and the teachable moment isn’t supernatural wisdom – it’s the
kind of observation a photographer would likely be very sensitive to. These people aren’t simply floating around in
Walter’s world – he has meaningful interactions with every single one of them,
all of which make perfect sense within the context of the world of the
film.
Which
brings me to the “too perfect, too airless” criticism. What, exactly, is the advantage of making an
argument that is not airtight? There are
many movies that I love and consider to be successful that are “messy” and “flawed,”
and those flaws add to the charm of the film.
But since when are flaws a requirement for a successful piece of
art? Yes, real life is often messy and
flawed. But we aren’t talking about real
life – we are talking about art, which gets to take great liberties in its
distillation of life. That is what makes
it art. Charlie Kaufman handled this
argument very nicely in his film Adaptation,
where the screenwriter character attends a seminar with Robert McKee and asks
why he can’t just tell a story about normal things happening to normal
people. McKee yells at him – “What gives
you the right to waste two hours of my life?”
(And to the criticism that this is Kaufman justifying his own bizarr-o
third act of that film, I will counter that exactly none of Charlie Kaufman’s
films are about normal things happening to normal people.)
Here
is another one: Glenn Kenny, writing on Roger Ebert’s site. “Let me be frank: to use the words of the
august founder of this web site, I hated, hated, hated this movie.” If you aren’t familiar with Roger Ebert’s
reviews, Mr. Kenny just (by association) compared The Secret Life of Walter Mitty to Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo.
Because that’s totally fair. What
is his complaint? “For all that, I'm giving the movie two stars, which,
in star speak, translates to ‘fair.’ I'm not doing this as a sop to anyone who
might end up charmed by the sometimes winsome and always self-help-book-like
particulars of Stiller's romantic fable, which is can-do optimistic in rather
stark contrast to Thurber's highly pessimistic mini-parable. I'm doing this
because I'm not entirely sure that my negative reaction isn't a sort of
personal carry-over from Stiller's last directorial effort, the intermittently
amusing but entirely smug and hateful TROPIC THUNDER.” That’s right – a professional critic, writing
on a prestigious website, just modified his own review because he wasn’t sure
he could distinguish between his feelings about the movie he was writing about,
and his feelings about Ben Stiller’s last picture, 2008’s TROPIC THUNDER, a
wildly successful and critically acclaimed movie. And all because Mitty’s storyline was apparently cloying to him. Here he is at the end of the review: “So again, there's a real question as
to how reliable my assessment of "Mitty" as a weak-tea bunch of
insincere pandering might be. On the other hand, your ability to swallow the
movie's nth fake epiphany scored to the nth contrived-crescendo concoction by Arcade
Fire or some other camouflaged emoting pomp rock outfit might not necessarily
make you a better person than I. It may mean you are a more patient one,
however.” All right, I’ll
bite. Here is a quote by lauded critic
Benedict Nightingale: “So often criticism seems to be a courtroom in which
theatre practitioners are arraigned. If
that is so, then perhaps the critic should think of himself as court recorder
and defense attorney at least as much as a prosecutor and judge.” In other words, having that kind of patience
is your fucking JOB.
I
really could spend the rest of the day going through these reviews piece by
piece, but I’ll sum up and shut up.
Whether the negative reviews were calling the film “manipulative,” “too
ambitious,” or “cloying” – and this describes nearly all of the negative
criticisms – it is worth stopping to examine this attitude. What film isn’t manipulative? (Answer: none of them. That’s precisely what film, and all other
arts, do.) And do we really want “too
ambitious” to be a criticism? How about
the many, many, many films that are not ambitious enough? Do they get a pass? The
Secret Life of Walter Mitty uses a slightly cynical albeit charming short
story and uses it to tell the story worth two hours of our lives and not simply
a page or two of the New Yorker – a man
comes to recognize his own life choices as untenable and breaks free of them. Mitty doesn’t
end with a wedding, a perfect job, or untold riches. It ends with a man having watered and grown
his own soul.
