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Analysis of James Thurber’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on June 12, 2021

As a 20th-century comic writer, James Thurber had few peers. Not only is “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” considered his best story, but the term Walter Mitty also has entered the language as a metaphor for an ordinary man who escapes into a fantasy world of impossible heroics. In this respect Mitty is both universal and American, particularly as critics see his antecedents stretching back to Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” and Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer . Mitty is the modern fictional reincarnation of the henpecked husband.

James Thurber/Library of America

The story opens in medias res, that is, in the middle of one of Mitty’s fantasies: He is a naval commander supervising a hydroplane during a raging storm. Mitty is the quintessential officer, worshipped by his crew for his bravery and ability. The reader understands at the same time as Mitty himself does that the scenario takes place only in Mitty’s imagination: He is actually driving a car, and his wife is ordering him to slow down. The rest of the fantasies in the story are similarly triggered by actual events. Mrs. Mitty’s ordering him to wear his gloves leads Mitty to imagine donning surgical gloves as, in the role of an internationally famous surgeon, he prepares to operate on a millionaire banker. In fact, he cannot even park his car properly and must turn it over to a contemptuous youthful parking attendant.

Thurber deftly juxtaposes the ordinariness of Mitty’s life—he is running errands for Mrs. Mitty while she keeps her hairdresser’s appointment—to larger issues of life and death. As a newsboy yells out the headlines of a murder trial, Mitty begins to imagine himself in court, the perfect defendant, only to associate the word cur with the puppy biscuit his wife has asked him to buy. Then, in one of the funniest scenes in the story, Mitty, looking at a copy of Liberty magazine, sees himself as a World War II pilot heroically bombing a German ammunitions plant. Interrupted for the last time by Mrs. Mitty—he has forgotten the puppy biscuit—Mitty imagines himself in front of a firing squad, stoically refusing the blindfold. Although both male and female critics have observed that, in Thurber’s view, American women have won the war between the sexes, it is the uncommon reader who can read this timeless classic of American humor without laughing.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bernstein, Burton. Thurber: A Biography. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1975. Holmes, Charles S., ed. Thurber: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974. Long, Robert Emmet. Thurber. New York: Ungar, 1988. Thurber, James. Vintage Thurber: A Collection of the Best Writings and Drawings. 2 vols. London: Hamilton, 1963.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

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Discussion Questions

Toward the end of the story, Mitty imagines the revolving doors of the hotel making a “derisive whistling sound” (Paragraph 15). Since the story describes the world solely through his eyes, might his imagination have colored other aspects of the “real world”? How reliable is his point of view?

Mitty’s daydreams feature very few women, and (unlike the men) none of them are named. Why is this, and does it relate to Thurber’s overall treatment of gender? Why are we never told Mrs. Mitty’s first name?

In his third fantasy, Mitty stands accused of a murder committed on June 14—Bastille Day. Why do you think Thurber chose this date? Who is the young woman who leaps into Mitty’s arms? Solve this murder mystery in a way you think Mitty might have chosen, and explain your rationale. Incorporate the original story’s themes.

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The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

James thurber, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Heroism and Masculinity

As Walter Mitty ferries his wife to her hairdresser’s and then buys some overshoes, he falls into fantasies that cast him in heroic and traditionally masculine roles: a naval commander, an expert pistol shot, a daring surgeon, a fighter pilot. He is admired for macho qualities like strength, bravery, aggression, lack of emotion, and holding his liquor, and is easily able to dominate the all-male social groups where his imagination makes him a leader. In…

Illness and Mortality

Mrs. Mitty is preoccupied with her husband’s health and possible illness (“You’re not a young man any longer,” she reminds him, insisting he put on the gloves and overshoes he doesn’t want to wear) and uses her concern to dismiss his feelings and assert control over his behavior. When she catches Mitty in the middle of a fantasy, she suggests he see the doctor, and when he asserts his right to be “sometimes thinking,” she…

Public Image and Embarrassment

Walter Mitty is very anxious about how others perceive him: for instance, he is so fearful of the young garagemen’s judgment that he plans to wear an unnecessary sling on his arm to avoid it, and he finds even the revolving doors of the hotel “faintly derisive.” Most other characters, from Mrs. Mitty to the traffic cop to the woman who laughs at him for saying “puppy biscuit” aloud on the street, interact with Mitty…

The Overlap of Fantasy and Reality

While at first glance Walter Mitty’s dramatic “secret life” couldn’t be more different from his mundane, routine reality, there are connections between the two lives. A newsboy’s shout about an ongoing trial triggers Mitty’s courtroom fantasy, and reading about aerial warfare turns him into a fighter pilot. More broadly, the themes and events in the fantasies are directly linked to the frustrations Mitty feels in reality, particularly his sense of not being in control of…

Concealment

The real-life Walter Mitty keeps his true self hidden, literally and figuratively. Whether he’s reluctantly putting on gloves and overshoes in obedience to Mrs. Mitty’s concern about his health, or planning to wear a sling on his arm to save himself from embarrassment, he believes concealing himself is necessary for his own protection; revealing his true self in any way would mean a risk of exposing his flaws. In his fantasies, however, Mitty is completely…

One of the most striking characteristics of Walter Mitty’s fantasies is their silliness. The fantasies may be heroic, but only melodramatically, cartoonishly so; from the fountain pen Mitty uses to replace a piston to the beautiful woman who materializes in his arms, they contain events and elements that couldn’t possibly happen in reality, and read like exaggerated parodies of action movies or adventure stories. Like a child playing pretend, Mitty makes a pocketa-pocketa-pocketa sound effect…

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Finding Beauty in the Ordinary: A Commentary on The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

The wonderful thing about the art of film is its potential to convey aspects of universal truth in almost any of its diverse array of genres. While this can certainly be said of most art forms, nowhere do those differences in genre feel more acute than in film. This article will examine an unlikely gem of somewhat recent years that may have received little fanfare upon release but, upon re-examination, has more to offer than initially meets the eye.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty began its journey to the big screen with a lengthy stint in a mire of production red tape, waiting almost 20 years to be green-lit as it was tossed from one director, studio, and potential lead to the next. The film drew its inspiration from James Thurber’s widely read 1939 short story of the same name. To many a dispirited high school student languishing away in the classroom, Walter Mitty’s exploits have proven most relatable. Thurber’s work describes a series of vivid daydreams experienced by Mitty, a rather bland and uninteresting sort of man, tasked with accompanying his wife on a series of mundane errands in the suburbs of a small Connecticut town. As the humdrum of ordinary life passes him by, Mitty dreams that he is anything from a daring bomber pilot, tasked with a suicide mission, to a noble revolutionary, dying for a great cause by firing squad. However, the story ends with his daydreams, bringing no change to his experience of reality.

Ben Stiller’s 2013 film recognizes the potential of Thurber’s main idea, the conflict between the mundaneness of reality and the life of one’s imagination, but develops the narrative into something more nuanced and heartfelt. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty could certainly be described as a “feel good” movie, but it would be a shame to simply leave it stuck with that appellation. On a purely visual level, the film is stunning, boasting snappy, colorful sequences which bring to life the world of the imagination with sweeping shots of epic mountain vistas all the way from Iceland to Afghanistan. It’s a heartwarming feature set on the most epic of canvases.

The narrative follows Walter Mitty, the most ordinary of men, who has spent the last 16 years working the same job as Negative Asset Manager (developing film negatives) in the gloomy bowels of LIFE Magazine’s colossal Manhattan headquarters. In the brief exposition, the unremarkable nature of his life is brought into painful focus as he struggles to add any interesting personal detail to his online dating profile. The irony is clear as day for one who’s employer touts the motto “To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, to draw closer, to find each other and to feel. That is the purpose of life.” It’s a setup that will pay rich thematic dividends down the line. As with Thurber’s protagonist, Mitty’s ordinary day-to-day interactions are frequently interrupted with vivid daydreams. What sets the cinematic adaptation apart from the short story is the thematic revelation that what appears ordinary on the surface may in fact be quite extraordinary beneath.

From the outset, the film highlights the conflict of the modern, the new, and the glitzy with the older, slower and more ordinary ways of approaching things. Mitty finds himself suddenly rendered obsolete amidst a ruthless corporate transition of LIFE magazine to a completely digital platform. With a probable layoff looming, he is tasked with developing a negative from legendary photographer Sean O’Connell for the last printed cover. To Mitty’s horror, O’Connell’s negative is missing, catalyzing Mitty’s ultimately transformative journey in search of it. O’Connell in many ways embodies an older, wiser and richer way of seeing things than what the contemporary world offers. He resists the allure of many modern conveniences, and, as Mitty discovers, understands the value in being fully present to appreciate the beauty of every ordinary moment.

In a world that is focused on casting aside the old for the new, O’Connell teaches Mitty a different way. Nowhere is this more clear than in the pivotal mountain scene where O’Connell decides to forgo the opportunity of a lifetime in capturing a rare snow leopard on film, telling Mitty that “Sometimes I don’t [take the picture]. If I like a moment…I mean, me, personally…I don’t like to have the distraction of the camera. Just want to stay in it. Yeah, right there. Right here.”

In his commitment to being fully present to these ordinary moments, O’Connell teaches a profound lesson in recognizing the beauty in what may at the surface appear mundane or boring. “Beautiful things don’t ask for attention,” he tells Mitty. In the ultimate reveal (spoilers) of his final greatly anticipated magazine cover, O’Connell chooses to show none other than Walter Mitty in a most candid moment of ordinariness, sitting in front of the building on his lunch break. He recognizes the years of quiet, dedicated work Mitty has done behind the scenes to make the magazine the success that it is. Disdained as no longer relevant by LIFE’s new corporate overlords, the film illustrates, through Sean’s eyes, the immense value of Mitty’s humble and mundane work in helping bring forth the magazine’s grand artistic vision. This is affirmed by Mitty’s mother who conveys to her son what Seam had once told her, “You were the person who worked the hardest…to make sure [Sean’s] work was realized the way he wished.” There is a simple and profound message that can be taken away here in how God sees each of us. We may look ordinary, feel unremarkable, and doubt the value we bring in our everyday lives, but God recognizes our extraordinary worth and sees the little simple acts of our daily lives.

While showing the value of Mitty’s ordinary work, the film also stresses the importance of breaking out of one’s comfort zone, taking a leap of faith, and realizing the true potential within. One could certainly see Mitty’s daydreams in the beginning of the film as metaphoric to the strength and ability he has within to step out into the unknown. The crucial moment where this great potential is actualized involves Mitty fully leaving behind his comforts and leaping from a helicopter into the frigid north Atlantic sea in the hopes of finding O’Connell in a nearby vessel. This rather light hearted sequence speaks to a deeper truth calling to mind Jesus’s words in scripture to cast out into the deep. Mitty’s plunge into the icy waters can be seen as a kind of baptism, he has accepted O’Connell’s invitation to follow him into the wild and, casting aside the comforts of his old life, is reborn as Walter Mitty, the wild-hearted adventurer. A motif found in many of the great stories of human history, from Bilbo in Lord of the Rings to Luke in Star Wars , we are reminded of the words of Pope Benedict XVI, “The world offers you comfort. But you were not made for comfort. You were made for greatness.”

With a fun and stylish execution, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty offers audiences simple yet profound lessons on the value of seeing the beauty in life’s ordinary moments while simultaneously believing in oneself to make that leap of faith into the unknown. There is no shortage of humorous moments and epic eye-popping shots which awaken the adventurer in each one of us.

A truly good work of art can speak to universal truths, no matter the genre or medium. T he Secret Life of Walter Mitty will leave you feeling uplifted and with a smile on your face, perfect for the next family movie night.

Editor’s Note: This article is adapted from the author’s blog 100 Movies Every Catholic Should See .

Stiller, B. (Director). (2013). The Secret Life of Water Mitty [Film]. 20th Century Fox.

Tagged as: Faith and Film , Movie Reviews , The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

By Cameron DeLaFleur

Cameron DeLaFleur is a husband and father, searching for the true, the good, and the beautiful through film, art, music, and God’s creation.

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Essay: The secret life of Walter Mitty

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My response to this short story is that it is a combination of fantasy and real life fiction. Walter Mitty, a middle-aged man, who breaks away from his normal life by daydreaming and having these fantasies about himself doing tremendous and amazing things to other people and his wife. To let the reader know that this story of Walter Mitty, both starts and concludes inside Walter Mitty’s fantasies. Walter Mitty, of course, is always pretending that he is somebody else rather than being himself. His fantasies all see him as being a triumphant person and a valiant individual, who is called upon to save the day, but, that’s only in his dream. He sees himself as a hero of some sorts, such as a doctor and a pilot commander from the navy and also a victim of the firing squad. But in the real world he would rather spend his livelihood wandering or daydreaming of the things that he isn’t, instead of being himself; rather make real changes is his life. The meaning of Walter Mitty’s final daydream or fantasy in the short story is that it can be pointed out or seen as a factual hero. In this part of the story, Walter mention the firing squad. He fantasizes and dreams of being shot or killed by the firing squad. He comes up to the firing squad so courageously; he is, at his final stage, upright and motionless. This can be understood as an indication that Walter Mitty’s fate is just to accept the fact that he has a boring and dull life. Walter Mitty, in his gentle modest way, has chosen his own trail and declines to submit to the desires of his unyielding wife and or the society around him. The tone of this Walter Mitty story is that it is a comedy, in such a way for the reason that Walter Mitty is a grown middle-aged man who lives a very tedious life but yet so much he dreams of this life of being a person of high standards, rather than being himself, so in there is just a vast dissimilarity between his fantasies and his everyday life. There’s also a vast amount of irony installed in the story. In every fantasy, in every dream, that he has or have, is irony. His perspective towards the fantasy is that he believes that these fantasies can come true while in the real world he allows his own wife to control or boss him around. The theme of this short story is to show the readers that we must stop wandering off to never land, daydreaming and live our lives the way we want. To stop fantasizing about the things we aren’t and get out there and make something out of life, and to not be anxious to live our lives with an adventurous and bold spirit. Nonetheless, it also shows the readers, that our dreams can conquer our actual reality, and what’s really going on in the real world. An example would be, Walter Mitty’s fantasies, it turned out to be so real for him and then he comprehends that these dreams or fantasies that he is having, they are not false, and it’s just in his mind and that he is just living a normal life. This story is a great example of a third person limited omniscient point of view. The difference between Walter Mitty’s Fantasies, his daydreams, with his boring everyday life, is that it expresses what the story is all about. Asides from all that is written above on this essay, after reading through this story I found that there are some moral values installed in this short story. Moral values such as we must behave ourselves in society and matters of principles and more generally what is believed to be considered usual or typical. In this case, Walter Mitty, for example, he in no way changes on the outside because he hardly ever moves away from his apparent behavior of inaction, the direct opposite of his action-packed fantasy world. As such the social moral is that Walter should give in the same kind of equivalent energy he uses to daydream into changing his shared world and his marriage with his wife. The story also remarks on the lifelessness of the middle class. We recognize Mrs. Mitty’s dissatisfaction but we too have to understand Walter Mitty’s need to get away from the dullness of the recurring, responsible life of an adult. In conclusion, Walter Mitty does have dreams. Dreams of being a hero that saves the day. But he’s not dreaming them while in bed, like everyone else is when they go to sleep. Instead, he’s fantasizing these occurrences while he’s awake while driving while shopping, talking to his wife. He sees himself as a hero that can save and protect everybody, but doesn’t actually do anything about it. He is just your average Joe that is taking his wife to the hair salon and gets her hair done. In addition to while getting her hair done, he runs some of his own errands that he has. However, in everyday life, all that we witness, experience, feels, hears generates these scenes in his head in which he, Walter Mitty is the hero of the story and he’s living and breathing right in it. While everyone looks at him like he’s weird and strange, and for him he doesn’t see what is wrong with this.

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The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013 Film)

By ben stiller.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013 Film) Summary

Walter, a negatives assets manager at Life Magazine , has a colorful imagination, one in which he is always taking risks and getting into outrageous adventures. At work and in life, however, he is a mild-mannered doormat, who goes along with the stronger personalities in his life and fulfills his obligations dutifully.

The magazine is downsizing and getting ready to produce their last-ever print issue. Renowned photographer Sean O'Connell has taken a series of photographs for the cover, and sends Walter the gift of a wallet to thank him for his work over the years, along with a negative of the photograph he wants to grace the cover. The only problem is: the negative is missing. Walter stalls his manager for time to locate it. Meanwhile Cheryl, Walter's office crush, has an idea that they can use the other negatives as a clue to Sean's current location and track him down. When Walter decides that Sean must be in Greenland, he books a plane ticket there to find Sean.

Walter arrives in Nuuk, the capital city of Greenland, and meets a local bartender who tells him that Sean has already left by ship. In order to find him, Walter tries to get on the postal helicopter that delivers mail along the coastline. The pilot of the helicopter is drunk, but he is wearing the distinctive ring that Walter spotted in one of Sean's picture. Out at sea, Walter jumps out of the helicopter and into the shark-infested waters, where he nearly gets eaten but is pulled onto a postal boat at the last moment.

Walter's timing is terrible yet again, as Sean has already left the boat. When the men on the boat give Walter some clementine cake that seems to be identical to the kind Walter's mother makes, Walter notices a travel itinerary on the wrapping of the cake. Sean is headed to Iceland to photograph a volcano there.

In Iceland, Mitty bikes to the volcano, and eventually gets a longboard from two Icelandic teenagers, which he uses to get closer to the volcano. He spots Sean on a little plane flying close to the volcano mouth. As he goes to follow, the volcano erupts, and Walter has no choice but to flee, losing Sean yet again. He returns to New York.

Back in New York, Walter is fired, and deduces that Cheryl and her estranged husband are back together. He leaves the Icelandic longboard on Cheryl's stoop as a gift for her son, Rich. Despondent, he goes to visit his mother, and throws the wallet that Sean gave him in the trash. Sitting on his mother's couch, he recognizes that her piano is actually the curved wood in one of Sean's negatives. His mother tells him that she has met Sean before, and that she told him all about it, but as usual Walter was too busy daydreaming about something else to listen to her.

Walter tracks Sean down in the Himalayas, photographing a rare snow leopard. He asks him about the missing negative, and Sean tells him that it was in the wallet he gave Walter as a gift. When Walter presses Sean to tell him what the photograph depicts, Sean refuses. Walter flies to Los Angeles but is detained at the airport. The only person he knows in Los Angeles is Todd , a customer representative from eHarmony, with whom Walter has been in touch about his dating profile.

Walter's mother decides to sell her piano, and Walter accompanies her. When he casually recounts the story of the mysterious negative in the wallet, his mother tells him that she rescued the wallet from the trash as soon as he had left. Sure enough, there is a tiny negative-sized envelope inside the wallet. Triumphant, Walter takes the negative to the magazine offices, and gives it to the manager who fired him, Ted. He then tells Ted off for disrespecting his tenured and loyal employees.

Later, Walter runs into Cheryl and is finally bold enough to tell her how he feels about her. She tells him her ex-husband was only at her house repairing the refrigerator, and they're not back together. Walter tells Cheryl about his adventure and about finding the negative, although he still doesn't know what was on it. Walking to the subway, they pass a newsstand which is selling the final print issue of Life. The issue is dedicated to its staff, and the cover shows Walter sitting outside the Time-Life building studying a contact sheet. As they walk down the street, Walter and Cheryl hold hands.

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The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013 Film) Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013 Film) is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

How does Ben Stiller’s 2013 film enhance James Thurber’s 1939 short story The Secret Life of Walter Mitty?

This really depends on if you think the movie version enhanced the story or not. Stiller was drawn to the material of Mitty in part because of the opportunity it presented to tackle more adult themes. In spite of his proficiency as a film...

How does Walter Mitty show transition to transformation?

Walter Mitty transforms within his own imagination... his reality is constant and unchanging.

In Walter’s notebook, how much did it say the piano storage was?

It was $200.

Study Guide for The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013 Film)

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013 Film) study guide contains a biography of director Ben Stiller, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

About The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013 Film)
Character List
Director's Influence

Essays for The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013 Film)

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013 Film) essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013 Film), directed by Ben Stiller.

Escaping Escapism: Cinematic Technique and Cumulative Message in 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty'
Creating a "Fully Functional" Protagonist: The Secret Life of Walter Mitty vs. Carl Rogers

Wikipedia Entries for The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013 Film)

Introduction

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, the secret life of walter mitty.

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Let me be frank: to use the words of the august founder of this website, I hated, hated, hated this movie.

From Ben Stiller's pantomimes of romantic hesitation in its opening moments as Walter Mitty goes all J. Alfred Prufrock on eHarmony.com, to costar Adam Scott's fussily styled fake beard, to the overall depiction of how a print magazine works/worked, to the consoling midtown-Manhattan romantic fade out, "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," directed by Stiller from a script by Steve Conrad that is itself loosely adapted from James Thurber's legendary short story (or, to be accurate, from the main conceit of Thurber's story), grated on my nerves something fierce.

For all that, I'm giving the movie two stars, which, in star speak, translates to "fair." I'm not doing this as a sop to anyone who might end up charmed by the sometimes winsome and always self-help-book-like particulars of Stiller's romantic fable, which is can-do optimistic in rather stark contrast to Thurber's highly pessimistic mini-parable. I'm doing this because I'm not entirely sure that my negative reaction isn't a sort of personal carry-over from Stiller's last directorial effort, the intermittently amusing but entirely smug and hateful " Tropic Thunder ." From the opening credit sequence, featuring the tableau-like visuals that recall the work of Wes Anderson —for whom Stiller acted in the wonderful " The Royal Tenenbaums "—my way of seeing the movie was circumscribed by the belief that what was being expressed/communicated was nothing much more than Stiller's own privilege. In "Tropic Thunder," that privilege was articulated via biting the Hollywood hand that fed him and telling the audience that it was getting what it deserved; here, the privilege manifests itself in Stiller's ability to take a big film crew to Greenland, Iceland, and a relatively safe stand-in for Afghanistan to impart some vague, semi-earnest be-here-now bromides to the paying customers.

Stiller plays the title character, a daydreamer so focused that even as he learns that he's likely to lose his job as a "negative assets handler" in the photo department of the real-life photo-driven Life (which ceased publication as a separate magazine in 2000, and was re-created as a newspaper supplement), he can't stop constructing fantasy scenarios involving the co-worker on whom he's crushing. (She is played, with surprisingly noncommittal likeability for such an appealingly idiosyncratic performer, by Kristen Wiig .)

These scenarios generally involve giving Mitty superpowers, and so the first half of the movie has a near-quorum of explosions and flying-human scenes. However. A missing negative from the magazine's star globe-trotting photog ( Sean Penn ) sets Mitty on his own real-life globe-trotting adventure in search of the photog, who can tell him where the missing shot is. (You are likely to figure it out before Mitty does.) He hops on a helicopter flown by a drunken quasi-Nordic oaf, plummets into a stormy Arctic sea, skateboards to an Icelandic volcano, inadvertently tracks a snow leopard in South Asia, and more. Along the way he makes the Very Important Discovery that, while his fantasies might in some ways exercise his imagination, they are in a certain sense holding him back. In other words, don't dream it, be it.

I liked the message better in "Rocky Horror" myself. While everything Stiller attempts here has a real professional polish, what "Mitty" lacks is any sense of what life might actually be like for the kind of "ordinary man" Mitty represents. Adam Scott's dismissive, ignorant bean-counter, a company man who's overseeing the shutdown of Life , comes off more like a nasty CAA agent than a publishing executive. And every now and then a Mitty fantasy will show its snide hand: there's an entirely beside-any-point "Benjamin Button" parody here that wouldn't pass muster as an MTV Movie Awards sketch. These sorts of incidental irritations, I began to notice, led me to some possible overpicking of nits, as in "I was in Iceland last winter, and everyone there speaks English almost perfectly, Stiller!"

So again, there's a real question as to how reliable my assessment of "Mitty" as a weak-tea bunch of insincere pandering might be. On the other hand, your ability to swallow the movie's nth fake epiphany scored to the nth contrived-crescendo concoction by Arcade Fire or some other camouflaged emoting pomp rock outfit might not necessarily make you a better person than I. It may mean you are a more patient one, however.

Glenn Kenny

Glenn Kenny was the chief film critic of Premiere magazine for almost half of its existence. He has written for a host of other publications and resides in Brooklyn. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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The Secret Life of Walter Mitty movie poster

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013)

114 minutes

Ben Stiller as Walter Mitty

Kristen Wiig as Cheryl Melhoff

Adam Scott as Ted Hendricks

Kathryn Hahn as Odessa Mitty

Patton Oswalt as Todd

Terence Bernie Hines as Gary

Kathryn Hahn

Ben Stiller
Steve Conrad
James Thurber

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Compare and Contrast: "The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty" Book and Movie

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Analysis of James Thurber’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

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Essay: The secret life of Walter Mitty

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