World meets ‘Mitty’ at last
Ben Stiller’s take on Thurber’s story premieres after a long development process.
NEW YORK — Can “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” turn its dreams into reality?
That question about the Ben Stiller fantasy saw the first hints of an answer Saturday at the New York Film Festival, where the Christmas Day release had its world premiere.
“I want to thank the Film Society of Lincoln Center for having the courage to show a Ben Stiller movie,” the director quipped as he took the stage before the Saturday night debut at the festival’s upscale Alice Tully Hall. “I grew up 20 blocks away. And thanks to you, I’m finally allowed inside the building.”
The movie — a $90-million gamble for 20th Century
Fox — arrived at the confab after a 19-year development process led by producer John Goldwyn that included at least five directors, four lead actors, three studios and one lawsuit before settling on the current version, written by Steve Conrad (“The Pursuit of Happyness”) and costarring Kristen Wiig.
Nominally a remake of the 1947 Danny Kaye comedy, the new “Mitty” hews more closely to James Thurber’s 1939 New Yorker short story that follows a repressed man who compensates for his dreary existence with reveries about globetrotting adventures.
Conrad’s screenplay is set in the modern world and, though it involves f lights of fancy similar to those in the Kaye film, focuses on its title character’s romantic travails (chiefly via his pining for a co-worker played by Wiig), his struggles as a photo staffer at a declining Life magazine, and a real-life trek around the globe to find a lost image from a mysterious photographer (Sean Penn).
The 1947 film was largely a series of comedy vignettes for Kaye, near the height of his popularity at the time, whereas the new film looks to tell a more dramatic story. And unlike Kaye’s intrinsically nebbishy Mitty, the new version is concerned with how a man who once seemed to have the world at his feet was thrown off track.
“I wanted it to pick up where Thurber left off,” Conrad told The Times. “This is a movie that looks at something I think a lot of us feel: an obligation to the promise of our talent and the frustration at not being able to develop it.”
Before Conrad, other writers couldn’t seem to find a way to modernize Norman McLeod’s 1947 movie and its postwar frustrations. Stiller was initially set only to star in the film when, after ruminating on Conrad’s script, he realized he also wanted to direct it.
The filmmaker said what resonated for him was the script’s deft commentary on modern life.
Noting that, as a director, he took his cue from more intimate stories such as Billy Wilder’s 1960 classic “The Apartment,” also about an office schlep, Stiller said the new “Mitty” was about “this world transforming from analog to digital and what gets left behind with all that.
“Even in the pace of a movie, we wanted to honor that,” he told reporters earlier in the day, adding, “We wanted to create a world that was real but in its own world a little bit.”
That blend — and the mix of comedy A-listers with a more delicate vibe — seemed to divide audiences on Saturday.
Snarky tweets from a number of press-screening attendees earlier in the day were soon followed by adulation that night at the public debut.
The split reaction suggested a movie with an uphill climb on the awards front but an easier time on the commercial one, thanks to its shiny effects and moments of quiet human comedy. It is a story of regret and redemption, themes that have played particularly well of late with older audiences, who turned films such as “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” into hits.
Still, the studio will be in the position of marketing a $90-million movie to a broad mainstream audience that in the modern era has been less amenable to a more slowly paced film with meditative elements, especially during the flashy holiday-release period.
Conrad noted that he thought there were precedents. “To me, in that regard this is no different from ‘Planes, Trains and Automobiles,’” he said, referring to the John Hughes staple, “which is a movie my family and I think a lot of families watch every year around the holidays.”
In one sense, Fox has already achieved something other studios couldn’t just by reaching the finish line. Previous iterations with the likes of Steven Spielberg, Jim Carrey, Mike Myers and Ron Howard all failed to gain traction, as did studios DreamWorks, Paramount and New Line, which all attempted to make the movie before Fox came on board about seven years ago. New Line and John Goldwyn even got into a legal tussle over it.
In his pre-screening remarks, Stiller alluded to the long road.
“A lot of people think studios are bad and these faceless, greedy corporations. And they are,” he deadpanned.
“But there also people there who run them. The people at this studio decided to take a chance on this movie.”