Ultimately, Walter Mitty calls us into taking risks and embracing courage. These ABCs of escapade are perfectly embodied in photographer Sean O’Connell (a wonderful and woefully short performance from Sean Penn), a renaissance man who stitches his own gunshot wounds and flies atop bi-planes into exploding volcanoes. When Walter finally meets Todd in person, he describes Walter as “Indiana Jones meets the lead singer from The Strokes.” Adventure. When asked if he’s gone anywhere notable, Walter can only respond with a hesitant, “Phoenix…?” Has Walter done anything interesting or noteworthy? The question is met with silence as Walter checks out from reality into another fantasy. His fantasies only begin to diminish as he takes literal leaps of faith, beginning with an impulsive flight to Greenland, jumping onto a helicopter, jumping off the same helicopter, fighting a shark, etc. On the one hand, we witness Walter’s movement from the mundane into a life of courageous risk. When Walter calls customer service at eHarmony for help with his profile and connecting with the woman he secretly admires, he has little to offer Todd, the overly-friendly customer service rep. Walter Mitty is about a man in his forties undergoing such a process.Įven the message of Walter Mitty is a patchwork of theses. A person left entirely with a patchwork self feels a low sense of self-esteem and value it is only when one becomes aware of one’s individuality, vocation, and purpose that the patchwork self is discarded for the integrated whole. In adolescent identity formation, each person undergoes the process of constructing a patchwork self, a smattering of various identities that come together in quilt-like fashion, various selves stitched together into a mostly-coherent whole. Perhaps this is intentional on Stiller’s part, but I wonder if Walter Mitty is simply a film–and a filmmaker–going through a sort of adolescence. There are beautiful sweeping panoramas of striking landscapes there are affecting conversations about presence and beauty there are hilarious fantasies with the tone of a goofball comedy.
Is it a comedy? A drama? An adventure film? A fantasy? One is never quite sure as the tone and pacing shift and adjust according to Walter’s experiences. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, like its titular protagonist, is without a clear identity.
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