code), he travels to Iceland, Afghanistan and other far-flung places, and the movie becomes a lavish, surreal travelogue, blending digital effects with stunning landscape montages.also, somewhat more riskily, tries to fold the kind of playful, wide-eyed high spirits familiar from the Night at the Museum movies into what is in effect a midlife melodrama. lt; ... gt ;. Walter is a low-key suitor, and Cheryl is drawn to him for his thoughtfulness and quiet sense of humor rather than for the alpha-male derring-do he secretly possesses. In one funny, poignant scene, he executes a series of impressive skateboard moves - real, not imaginary - while her back is turned. But showing off like that would be out of character in any case.maybe not entirely. Though it is a celebration of modesty, there is also quite a lot of vanity in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. (And quite a lot of corporate propaganda too, for Papa John s Pizza, Cinnabon and eHarmony, the online dating site represented by the irreverent, just-a-regular-guy-like-you presence of Patton Oswalt.) Mr. Stiller (working from a screenplay by Steven Conrad) is not content to be the hero of the story; he turns Walter into an almost-martyr and a would-be saint, a mystical self-help guru whose journey of self-discovery makes him better than everyone else, though of course he is too enlightened to say so.
