In this movie, Walter Mitty has spent his formative years taking care of his widowed mother and younger sister by working at Life magazine processing negatives for the world’s most renowned photojournalist (a grizzled Sean Penn). This Mitty long ago gave up the life he longed to live – a life of travel, new experience, and intrigue – for an ordinary life of everyday care for others. His fantasies aren’t a virtue they are endemic of a life lived in resignation. This Mitty daydreams about taking risks instead of actually taking them. Stiller’s Walter Mitty (Stiller himself in a charmingly dour role) is a different kind of man, and his “secret life” serves a different purpose in his real life and in the story. Thurber’s Mitty maintains his innate sense of adventure in a world of overshoes, snow chains, and parking lot attendants. Thurber’s story, which you can read in its entirety here, concerns a man who, by the virtue of daydreaming, escapes the mundanity of everyday life (exemplified most uncharitably by his nagging wife). The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Ben Stiller’s latest directorial effort, is based on a (very) short story by the same name by American humorist James Thurber originally published in the New Yorker in 1937.
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