The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (125 minutes) PG
There’s something about the
mild mannered nature of The Secret
Life of Walter Mitty that is
intriguing. A welcome change from loud and incessantly preachy self-discovery
stories, the adaptation of the 1939 James Thurber
short story, written by Steve Conrad and directed by and starring Ben Stiller
as the titular daydreaming office worker, has a curiously quiet temperament. More than anything, the film feels like a personal triumph
for Stiller who directs with a poignant blend of introspection and revelatory
reflection that teeters closely towards mysticism without feeling cheesy.
Set in the present day, the
film chronicles the decline of Life magazine as a print publication moving to
an all-online format. Photo archivist Walter
Mitty is anxious about being fired after he misplaces a negative from the legendary
photographer Sean O'Connell (Sean Penn) that was intended for the cover of the
magazine’s final issue. Meanwhile, his new boss in charge of ‘the transition’,
the intrusive Ted Hendricks – played by an obnoxious and opulently bearded Adam
Scott - is barely able to feign consideration for the impending unemployed.
Walter’s secret crush and
co-worker Cheryl Melhoff aids him in his search
for the mysterious missing photograph by encouraging him to go into the unknown.
Kristen Wiig gives an understated but delightful performance that suits the
movie’s overall pensive mood. Taking him all the way to Greenland and beyond
where he undertakes an internal spiritual journey turned external, Walter’s escapades
include jumping out of a moving helicopter, skateboarding at top speed down a
deserted Icelandic highway and trekking the Himalayas.
Critics may call it quasi-profound or cloying
but I found the note of sentimentality the film ends on to be sweet yet subdued.
August: Osage County (130 minutes) MA
There is a hell of a lot of
acting going on in August: Osage County.
This adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize winning stage show is a relentless
showcase of brash personalities, A-class actors and much gnashing of teeth on
part of the audience, all surrounding hellish family conflict.
John Wells’s revision
of Tracy Letts’s play transpires a tad unsettlingly onscreen as we look into
the personal lives of the strong-willed women of the
Weston family, whose paths have re-crossed when a family crisis brings them
back to the Oklahoma house they grew up in, and to the dysfunctional woman who
raised them.
A weighty, acting-heavy
first half is levitated by a more interesting second half, identified by a
catastrophic series of events and lively domestic confrontations. By the time the characters sink in and start to
break caricature to properly feel like a family, you’re left questioning why it
took so long. Somewhere along the way, I found
an unexpected solace in Julia Roberts’s character, Barbara Weston-Fordham, the unhappy daughter who is horrified to find she is
turning into her mother. Roberts is fiercely uncompromising in her brassiness
and is comfortably suited to the role of a hardened
southerner who takes no prisoners. Meryl on the other
hand comes off as a bit overcooked, only rising above parody in rare moments of
quiet. Having recently witnessed her staggeringly overrated Oscar winning
performance in The Iron Lady (another tale about an ill elderly woman turned
psychotic), I wasn’t altogether entranced by Violet Weston.
Broadened acting such as this
fits stage like a glove with the sheer amount of energy at play being dispelled
to the rafters, but on film, with the overpowering use of close-up, the
material is overwhelming. Perhaps the subject matter is too depressing, or the
melodrama overheated, but confrontational drama written as well as this needs
more delicate handling. From someone who revels in a good
dark comedy, this one was a little too humourless for me.
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