A lot of people were bowled over by the trailer (watch below) for Ben Stiller‘s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and the screening at the New York Film Festival over the weekend was hotly anticipated. However, shortly after the screening let out a friend of mine in attendance contacted me and didn’t have anything flattering to say, boiling it down to an “E-Harmony Music commercial montage.” This person was far more harsh than many of the Twitter reactions I was reading, but overall I got the impression there weren’t many that enjoyed it.
Fandor has done a round-up of the reviews, the first of which from Slant reiterates what my friend said, writing, “A cinematic Hallmark card about the triumph of the human spirit, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty finds Ben Stiller courting Oscar-season accolades through a tale that’s all schmaltz, no substance.”
The commercial comparison and once again bringing up Hallmark, over at Film.com David Ehrlich writes, “[I]f Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru were remade as an 114-minute Super Bowl commercial. A visually playful enlightenment drama that’s so preoccupied with inspiring its audience that it never bothers articulating a coherent message to inspire them with, Stiller’s film so consistently undercooks its cheap Hallmark sentiments that none of these pseudo-rousing peans to the inherent wonder of being alive ever congeal into anything meaningful.”
Over at The Playlist, Rodrigo Perez writes, “Walter Mitty boasts a strong cast, but one misused by a pedestrian script that embraces clichés and places conventional, groan-worthy conclusions at the end of each storyline shared by Walter and every major character he’s met.”
Even over at The Hollywood Reporter, Scott Feinberg seems to be making excuses for the film and covering his bases just in case the Academy likes it more than he seemed to:
Films of this sort are generally categorized as “fantasy,” which is not the Academy’s favorite genre, and this year’s awards season is tremendously competitive, so I cannot say with any degree of confidence that this film will be nominated for any major Oscars. But, if I had to venture a guess, I think that voters will check it out (if only because Stiller and Wiig possess such likable screen personas) and probably be charmed by it. Will that be enough to bag it a best picture or best actor nom anywhere but at the Golden Globes? We’ll have to see how the rest of the field shakes out, but I wouldn’t rule it out.
Jeff Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere says “it daydreams itself into a kind of narrative cul de sac” while adding, “Mitty is a first-rate thing in terms of Stiller and [Kristen] Wiig’s performances and in several below-the-line ways. But the second half is really quite silly or at least willfully bizarre, and I’m sorry for that because as a Stiller fan from way back I was really hoping to be stirred or even mesmerized. Nope.”
I’m not sure when it will finally screen here locally in Seattle so I can finally get a look at it, but it won’t hit theaters until Christmas Day. Based on its position at the New York Film Festival it’s clear Fox is imagining some Oscar love in the future so it might turn out the next round of screenings may be a bit of a ways off, hoping to distance themselves from this early round of bad buzz.
