Movie reviews: The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

Daydream believer, oh what can it mean? Ben Stiller stars as the eponymous hero in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (PG), an anonymous man with a vivid imagination. Working as a ‘negative assets manager’ in the basement of Life magazine, Walter mislays the negative of a photograph sent by intrepid photographer Sean O’Connell (Sean Penn), an image intended as the cover of the very last issue of Life. Determined to put things right, Walter makes a leap of the imagination and sets out to track down O’Connell, in the process becoming the hero of his own life story. Directed by Stiller, and adapted (as was its 1947 predecessor) from a short story by James Thurber, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a touching tale that most of us, I’d imagine, can empathise with. Walter’s flights of fancy are ridiculously heroic — in his imagination, he jumps into burning buildings without so much as a drop of a hat — but Walter is acutely aware that his imagination is working overtime to compensate for the crushing banality of his reality. Trapped in his neat and tidy apartment, forever totting up his bank balance, bunkered in his basement at work, Walter believes that life is passing him by. From the very beginning as his shyness prevents him from asking his work colleague Sheryl (Kirsten Wiig) on a date, we understand that it’s not a lack of adventurous opportunities that’s holding Walter back, but the debilitating belief that life is elsewhere. Stiller, as actor and director, gives the action sequences plenty of crowd-pleasing verve, but it’s in the quieter moments, and with surprisingly deft touches, that he gives Walter and his story an unexpected emotional depth.

Written and directed by J.C. Chandor, All Is Lost (12A) offers the kind of adventure that even Walter Mitty might think twice about undertaking. Sailing alone in the Indian Ocean, an unnamed man (Robert Redford) wakes to discover that his yacht has collided with a shipping container. With the yacht holed, and his navigation and radio equipment destroyed, the man struggles to patch up some repairs, all the while hoping against hope for a miracle. And then a violent storm strikes… A survival tale pared down to the minimalist basics (the script, apparently, was only 36 pages long), All Is Lost is a single-hander drama featuring one man, a crippled boat and a vast ocean, with virtually no dialogue and only very rare intrusions by the score to complement the natural sounds of sea and wind. Redford, now 77, is appropriately windswept and craggy as the sailor, an Everyman who eschews the usual Hollywood heroics for a dogged resourcefulness and a determination not to give his life up cheaply. It’s a majestic performance, not least because for most of the movie Redford appears not to be acting at all. There are echoes here, of course, of every Robinson Crusoe-style tale of shipwreck you’ve ever seen (and, indeed, the recent smash Gravity), but All Is Lost is also remarkably similar in theme and tone to Jeremiah Johnson (1972), when Redford played a mountain man who battled both the elements and his own limitations in a desperate struggle to survive. A special mention goes to the cinematography by Frank G. DeMarco and Peter Zuccarini, which manages to convey the claustrophobic isolation of the mariner’s plight despite the vast and featureless ocean surrounding him. The movie, however, belongs to Redford, who turns in one of the most compelling performances of his career in a virtually wordless paean to the indomitable human spirit.