After a summer of superhero action and feel-good animated comedies, Hollywood has turned to forlorn figures with films that explore existential dilemmas faced by isolated characters.
The autumn-winter months are traditionally when film studios release their top dramas to beat the end-of-year Oscars deadline and build buzz heading into the Hollywood awards season. This year, Tinseltown is banking on the socially alienated.
Loners, dreamers, misfits and outcasts show up in films such as Ben Stiller's The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity, Kimberly Peirce's remake of Stephen King's Carrie, and the big-screen adaptation of Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card's 1985 sci-fi tale of young people in warfare.
Walter Mitty, a fictional character from a 1939 short story by James Thurber, defines a person not comfortable in his own skin or surroundings, alienated by idealistic aspirations. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty's star and director Stiller says he feels people will latch onto the protagonist's inability to connect to the world around him. "There was something very accessible and relatable about the idea of a guy who exists more in his head and isn't able to be who he wants to be," he says.
Stiller's Mitty is a Life magazine employee, handling the film negatives of its photo archive and embarking on a fantastical journey to find a missing photograph that would go in the final issue before the publication moves online. "He's an analogue guy in a digital world. That change is something generational. I can relate to that and I feel a lot of people will relate as well," Stiller says.
Mitty's challenge in accepting a changing world is echoed in Spike Jonze's Her, which stars Joaquin Phoenix as a lonely writer who develops a relationship with a female-speaking computer system. The film highlights the increasing disconnect as technology brings people together virtually, but segregates them physically.
The social insecurity and alienation also reflect the financial and economic insecurity that occurred in recent years and has worked its way into today's films, says Jack Epps Jnr, screenwriter of Top Gun and Dick Tracy, and a professor at the University of Southern California.