The film has been on my ‘to watch list’ for quite a while. Not too high up, so it took some time before I did watch it. The film is exactly the quirky romantic tragic comedy that I thought it would be and a nice one too.
Walter Mitty is shown as the most boring of boring men in the first scenes of the film. Dreary hallways in his apartment building, a job in the dusty basement of Life Magazine. Walter is also a daydreamer. His body can go into ‘pause mode’ while he travels to imaginary lands in imaginary situations. This often to the astonishment and amusement of for example colleagues.
Life Magazine is going through the transformation of a printed periodical to an online magazine which -of course- means cuts and redundancies. Their star photographer just sent his latest shots and included a letter that photo number 25 is his best ever and deserves a place on the cover. There is one problem: just that photo negative misses from the shipment. Walter is pressured into finding it.
Where the film slowly becomes more and more surrealistic when we watch in Walter’s head, his locating of the photo negative brings him a real adventure (or does it?). He travels to Greenland, then to Iceland (and eats in a restaurant that I visited too) and back to work to find out that the elusive photographer that he is after has visited his mother which leads Walter to the Himalayas for his next clue.
At the same time Walter gets in contact with a colleague that he likes and he proves to have had a somewhat rebellious youth. The grey mouse is not as grey as he seemed to be in the first place.
“The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty” is a nice, funny and slightly weird film to watch some time when you feel like watching something light.
