the secret life of walter mitty the new yorker

LIFE is about to cease publishing, and for its final cover the editors have chosen a shot from their globe-trotting photojournalist star, Sean O’Connell (Sean Penn). Stiller and screenwriter Steven Conrad have given Thurber’s story a 21st-century twist by setting the film in our era of corporate downsizing. Instead, he retreats into his head and imagines himself a dashing mountain climber or a hot-blooded Casanova. The irony, of course, is that even though he works at a place called LIFE, he hasn’t lived.

Stiller, who also directed, plays Mitty as an absentminded, socially awkward nebbish who works in the photo department at LIFE magazine. But his new film, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” despite all of its visual razzle-dazzle, never locates the beating heart of its hero. Ben Stiller’s no stranger to such clown-crying-on-the-inside gambits (see: “Permanent Midnight” and “Greenberg”). Not only has CGI made it relatively simple to turn Walter Mitty’s daydreams into Technicolor tapestries of digital eye candy, it’s also the kind of emotionally textured role that can be a springboard out of the banana-peel slapstick ghetto. Warner in his autobiography My First Hundred Years in Hollywood, described the actor Errol Flynn in the following way: 'To the Walter Mittys of the world he was all the heroes in one magnificent, sexy, animal package'.It’s easy to understand why comedians like Jim Carrey, Mike Myers, and Sacha Baron Cohen have flirted with adapting James Thurber’s 1939 New Yorker story about a timid man with a vibrant fantasy life. The name Walter Mitty and the derivative word 'Mittyesque' have entered the English language, denoting an ineffectual person who spends more time in heroic daydreams than paying attention to the real world, or more seriously, one who intentionally attempts to mislead or convince others that he is something that he is not. It was also adapted into a 2013 film, which is again very different from the original. It was made into a 1947 movie of the same name, with Danny Kaye in the title role, though the movie is very different from the original story. The story is considered one of Thurber's 'acknowledged masterpieces'. It has since been reprinted in James Thurber: Writings and Drawings (The Library of America, 1996, ISBN 1-88), is available on-line on the New Yorker website, and is one of the most anthologized short stories in American literature. The most famous of Thurber's stories, it first appeared in The New Yorker on March 18, 1939, and was first collected in his book My World and Welcome to It (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1942). 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty' (1939) is a short story by James Thurber.

The secret life of walter mitty the new yorker