For my midterm paper, I will discuss the film experience of one of my favorite recent films, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, directed and starring Ben Stiller. This film is the story of a man with many dreams and aspirations, who daydreams about a different life, filled with his fantasies of heroism, romance and action. I will analyze the mise-en-scené, cinematography, editing, and film sound of this film. The thing about this film is that there are so many different settings; I believe it is one of the best-put together films, which uses all of the critical elements of cinema to create a brilliant film and allows the viewer to understand each of the elements of cinema.
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a film that is brilliantly put together. The first elements of cinema that stood out to me and noticed the most was the use of cinematography, and the miss en scene of each shot or setting. Director Ben Stiller used very dramatic where the main character Walter went into a deep day-dream, imagining himself as a hero who for example, saved a dog out of a burning apartment building. The way the film dramatically jumped from Walters’s everyday reality to this unreal fantasy. There are some unbelievable shots as Walter goes on his adventure across the world, settings such as Greenland, the tip of a Volcano, and Iceland in search of a lost photograph taken by famous photographer Sean O’Connery, played by actor Sean Penn. Throughout the film, there are multiple metaphors, allusions, and symbolism. For example when Walter Mitty lands in Greenland, he rents a vehicle from a man in a small little booth. Mitty asks, “Do you have any cars here?” “Yeah, a red one and a blue one” the goofy Greenland native said. Walter chose the red car, it was funny to me because that scene was a lot like the Blue Pill or Red Pill from The Matrix. The props in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty are not so much items, but people. Walter is driven by two things