Secret Life of Walter Mitty

(CNN) -- 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. 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. Ben Stiller's no stranger to such
clown-crying-on-the-inside gambits (see: "Permanent Midnight" and "Greenberg"). 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.

Stiller, who also directed, plays Mitty as an absentminded, socially awkward nebbish
who works in the photo department at LIFE magazine. The irony, of course, is that
even though he works at a place called LIFE, he hasn't lived. Instead, he retreats
into his head and imagines himself a dashing mountain climber or a hot-blooded
Casanova. Stiller and screenwriter Steven Conrad have given Thurber's story a
21st-century twist by setting the film in our era of corporate downsizing. 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). Then
Mitty misplaces the negative. And with the encouragement of a co-worker he's sweet
on (Kristen Wiig), he embarks on a quest to find O'Connell, leading him to Greenland
and the Himalayas.

As Stiller's Mitty crisscrosses the planet, he slowly transforms into the action
hero he's always been in his fantasies. While stunning sequences show him
skate-boarding away from an erupting volcano and fighting off a great white shark,
the character never becomes more than a fuzzy conceit. At the risk of
psycho-analyzing a film that's already too deep inside its own head, Stiller seems
to lack the confidence as a dramatic actor to fully commit to the emotional
potential of his story. Too often he aims at our funny bones when he should be
targeting our heartstrings. In the end, Walter Mitty is a film about acting out our
dreams. But Stiller never quite shows us the soul of his dreamer. Details