It had to be Stiller

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (PG)
Running time 125 minutes
Rating:***
If anyone was going to play the downtrodden, daydreaming wimp that is Walter Mitty, it just had to be Ben Stiller.
After his experiences with Robert De Niro as the downtrodden, daydreaming Gaylord Focker in Meet the Parents, no-one else could show such a wistful longing for a proper place in the world, and he does a damn good job, both as actor and director.
To a young audience, coming to The Secret World of Walter Mitty via The Hangover, American Pie and Night at the Museum, Stiller creates a pleasing picture of an ordinary man, overcoming his inadequacies and triumphing over all his adversities.
And, coming from that point of view, the film is great entertainment. Mitty (Stiller) is a negatives controller at Life magazine, the world-famous American periodical that vanished from the racks half-a-dozen years ago. The magazine is taken over by a hotshot MD Ted Hendricks (Adam Scott), who comes in to pull it to pieces and convert it into an online publication, with inevitable fall-out of sackings and such like.
Mitty, while trying to romance fellow worker Cheryl (Kristen Wiig), manages to lose a vital front cover picture and has to find the photographer to get another copy.
Sadly, that involves flying to Greenland, jumping into the Arctic Ocean in everyday clothes, flying in a helicopter with a maudlin, drunk pilot, and other tests of resolve for a real hero, let alone a daydreaming one.
As in all good Hollywood movies, Mitty gets his photo, and much more besides, enabling the audience to leave the cinema with that feelgood feeling.
On that basis, the film is fine family fare, good entertainment and a credit to an actor gradually turning into a capable director.
But, if you come to this film from another direction – one that involves a little more background – then the happiness is tinged with the faintest of regrets, for, back in 1939 when James Thurber wrote the short story on which this film is meant to be based, had an altogether deeper, darker and more complex idea in mind.
Mitty in 1939 was certainly downtrodden and a daydreamer, but was bullied by his wife and never escaped his narrow life, except in his head. The 1947 film of the story, starring Danny Kaye, also tried to lighten and simplify the story – and Thurber hated it.
The 2013 version, even simpler, with no dark side at all, would have appalled him and he would have responded with a typically waspish comment, accompanied by one of his weird, unsettling line cartoons.
For, even though Thurber called himself a humourist, his grasp of the realities of the world was a good deal firmer than Hollywood’s where you could imagine the headaches caused by one of Thurber’s main mottos – “Early to rise and early to bed makes a man healthy, wealthy, and dead”.
Watch and have fun – then read the short story, and for a treat, Thurber’s wry, penetrating output.