The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

The dream world and reality progressively and beautifully blend in the latest from director Ben Stiller. The film is based, just a little bit, on the short story by James Thurber about a man prone to elaborate daydreams. Stiller uses that story as a springboard to something altogether new and surprisingly intimate. Stiller, in one of his best performances, plays the title character, an introverted man holding down a job handling photo negatives for Life magazine. When an important negative for the final publication of the magazine goes missing, Walter, with help from work crush Cheryl (a delightful Kristen Wiig) springs into action on a quest that leads him through Greenland, Iceland and Afghanistan. Along the way, he reignites former passions (like skateboarding and hiking), and those daydreams become more and more unnecessary. The message that Stiller is delivering with his film is an obvious one: Many of those daydreams we are having are just a hop, skip and skateboard away from being realities. A great supporting cast includes Adam Scott, Sean Penn and Shirley MacLaine.