Double Bill: Stranger Than Fiction and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

Double Bill: 

Stranger Than Fiction and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

I had every reason to suspect that I would hate Stranger Than Fiction (Marc Forster, 2006) and The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty (Ben Stiller, 2013 – the remake better suits my purposes!): both star actors that I go from not really minding to actively disliking, depending upon he direction of the wind; both appeared to be deliberately faux-indie major studio releases, striving to be cool with hipster soundtracks and muted colour schemes; both are about stuff that I didn't think I'd find interesting. I have rarely been more delighted to be proved wrong! These are two surprisingly good low-key comedies starring two of today's biggest stars of comedy, who, love them or hate them, turn in sterling against-type performances in films about how the little things can reveal the big picture. Together, they'd also make a fine evening's viewing.

Both films revel in their metaphysical leanings, carefree tinkering with film form and playful double entendre titles that become clear as the stories progress. Mitty shows Ben Stiller's titular hero's flights of fancy writ large onscreen, playing out his fantasies and mixing them with his actual adventures which are often just as fantastical, the effect being that you are often swept along with how joyfully ridiculous the story gets, without ever really questioning it. Fiction opts for a more structured conceit, where Will Ferrell's dull tax auditor Harold Crick's life is interrupted by its own narration, which only he can hear, and describes incidents varying from his morning routine to his untimely death. This creates an interesting dramatic tension: is Crick imagining the voice narrating his life (personified by Emma Thompson's troubled author), or is he the product of the narrator's imagination and bound to her every whim, even if it means his death? This is a film that is a Freudian slip away from being a Charlie Kaufman/Spike Jonze collaboration.

Despite my misgivings about the stars, Ferrell and Stiller play against type and in doing so make their characters hugely likeable. I am not a fan of their more slapstick tendencies and it's refreshing to see them stretch their other comedy muscles with deadpan and fantastic timing. Both play dull-but-likeable men stuck in loveless routines of jobs but over the course to the films, both learn to grab life by the scruff of the neck and write their own script or live out their fantasies respectively. Both are played out at a satisfying pace, allowing the characters to evolve naturally despite the more fantastical aspects at work. The one exception to this is Maggie Gylenhaal's love interest for Ferrell. She does good work with an interesting-if-underused character but the softening of her spiky exterior is too fast and smells a little of narrative convenience.

These are two films that are directed affectionately and with a quirky indie sensibility. Stiller throws in bizarro moments like an entire sequence set in Greenland culminating in Kristen Wiig's eminently loveable love interest Cheryl singing Bowie's 'Space Oddity'. Fiction director Marc Forster, the man responsible for the one recent Bond film that nobody liked, fills his film with keenly observed details (a couple lie in bed, his face lying nose-to-nose with the silhouette of hers), thoughtful framing and almost expressionistic scenery (the IRS records room is something from an unmade Kubrick film about taxation). If you look for them, there are nuggets of cinematic gold in two fairly understated films.

As the narratives deal with blurred lines between fiction/fantasy and reality, ultimately setting on the real, the here and the now, these are films you can get lost in; films that you can sit back and smile at. As each reaches its final denouement, the 'reveals' (the end of Crick's story, the reveal of Mitty's lost photograph) we feel like we've been on the same journey as the character, feel more positive about life, more passionate, more willing to do stuff; we just feel more. Ultimately, these films are thoroughly enjoyable marriages of major stars playing against type but totally on form, with directors (in Stiller's case, himself) who 'get' the material and know how to make it sing. Do yourself a favour and set aside a few hours to get lost in the narrative.