Ben Stiller can really cook, when he wants to. And The Secret Life of Walter Mitty was clearly his labor of love. He blended the eponymous short story by James Thurber with a fantasy-adventure about the end of an institution, LIFE magazine. It’s funny, visually beautiful, original and meaningful. And it has a very sweet ending.
Stiller plays Walter Mitty, a daydreamer reimagined as a ‘negative asset manager’ at LIFE – and here we mean photographic negatives. Back in the days of vinyl records and magnetic tape, photographs began as a physical object that had to be transported from the field to the publication office. They were precious objects, that had to be sorted, archived, tracked, and routed. That was Mitty’s job.
As the movie begins, LIFE is about to shut down. One issue, one cover, remains. A fearless photographer, Sean O’Connell (Sean Penn) is granted the privilege of making the cover image. It is on negative number 25 from a roll of 36. He sends it to Mitty, but… it goes missing. Now Walter must leave his protected life and go in search of the adventuring photographer. At all costs – he must find that negative.
It does not track the historical timeline, exactly, but it is as much homage to Thurber’s story as to a publication that may be difficult for many people today to even imagine. Let me try:
There was once a real photojournalism magazine in America. LIFE was big – I mean, physically larger than most other magazines. From its founding in 1883 it featured some of the best journalism and photography from around the world. From gritty war photography to Hollywood stars, from children suffering from mercury poisoning*, famines, science, space, to ghetto life and the civil rights movement, it was a big, important window.
And our family was never without it. It shaped my understanding of the world, of history, of the range of… LIFE. I love this movie for the tribute to something so important.
- Magazines I grew up reading: LIFE, National Geographic, Scientific American, TIME, The American Rifleman, and Phi Delta Kappan (an education journal). Plus a trade journal on clock repair. And occasionally, kids magazines like Boys Life, but they seemed kind of… pale compared to the other publications. If it was in the house, I read it.
- Special shout-out to comedian Adam Scott, as Ted Hendricks, the obnoxious corporate drone in charge of shutting down the magazine. His portrayal of an absolute backpfeifengesicht could not be better. A thankless job, to be sure.
- *LIFE correspondent W Eugene Smith was badly beaten by goons for his expose on the Minamata mercury poisoning disaster. It may have contributed to his death from a stroke later. Other correspondents died in battlefields and other dangerous assignments.
georgewiman 