Philippe Petit’s Walk: ‘Man on Wire’
Those who saw him hushed. On Church Street. Liberty. Cortlandt. West Street. Fulton. Vesey. It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful. Some thought at first that it must have been a trick of the light, something to do with the weather, an accident of shadowfall. Others figured it might be the perfect city joke — stand around and point upward, until people gathered, tilted their heads, nodded, affirmed, until all were staring upward at nothing at all, like waiting for the end of a Lenny Bruce gag. But the longer they watched, the surer they were. He stood at the very edge of the building, shaped dark against the gray of the morning. A window washer maybe. Or a construction worker. Or a jumper.
Up there, at the height of a hundred and ten stories, utterly still, a dark toy against the cloudy sky.
— Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin
Early on an August morning in 1974, a puckish Frenchman finally acted on an idea he’d been mulling, planning, and rehearsing for months on end, and one that had no other real purpose than that he thought it would be kind of fun. If that idea had involved joining the circus or hitchhiking across the country, there wouldn’t be much of a story. But since the Frenchman’s plan was to walk on a tightrope (actually a sturdy steel cable) he and his confederates had surreptitiously strung between the World Trade Center towers, the plan fairly screams out for further analysis. In case it needed to be said, there wasn’t any kind of safety net if he lost his balance or was blown over by the high winds ripping off the East River, just a plummeting fall of some 1,400 feet to the concrete below that was slowly filling up with curious onlookers.
With this week’s release of Robert Zemeckis’s eye-popping 3D retelling of this great adventure, The Walk, it’s worth revisiting a film from several years ago that first revived interest in Petit’s story. James Marsh’s bright-eyed 2008 documentary Man on Wire is the unaccountably thrilling story behind that nearly quarter-century-old exploit, shot in much the same proficient and playful manner as would befit the man who did it. The tightrope walker was Philippe Petit, a prank-prone street performer and theatrical jack of all trades who had trained himself as an accomplished high wire artist. Since walking on a wire in a circus tent with a long pole for balance simply didn’t fit his personality, Petit graduated to illegal performances, like walking between the towers of Notre Dame cathedral and the towers on the Sydney harbor bridge. Then he set his sights on the Twin Towers.
One of Man on Wire’s most rewarding features is how little it tries to decipher Petit’s actions, even with the copious amount of time it spends interviewing him and his accomplices. An inveterate performer with the affect of a fey, Gallic Danny Kaye, Petit is too busy waving his hands and detailing his wild desires in heavily-accented English to spend much time looking in depth at his motivations. A perpetually boyish elf who apparently never met a person whom he couldn’t charm into handing over their life savings, Petit just decided to do his highly illegal act, and put together a motley crew to help him pull it off.
It’s in the explication of Petit’s skulduggery that Man on Wire has the greatest amount of fun. Utilizing unusually well-crafted reenactments and a tongue-in-cheek manner of introducing these gentle criminals with dramatic close-ups and faux tough-guy nicknames, director Marsh establishes a pleasingly playful mood that perfectly mirrors Petit’s cheekily irreverent manner. It’s a delicately balanced mood and one that’s devilishly tricky for most directors to achieve, particularly someone like Marsh, who has shown a more gothic mentality in films like Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1980 and Wisconsin Death Trip.
All the film’s playfulness fortunately doesn’t mean it skips over the raft of logistics difficulties facing Petit and his team, from the first problem of breaking into both towers and making it up to the roofs, to evading security guards once up there, to the seemingly insurmountable engineering task of getting all the equipment up there and stringing the cable across (ultimately a bow and arrow was involved). Fortunately for Petit, his con-artist ways found a receptive audience in a number of New Yorkers, including an office worker who took it all as a lark and blithely let Petit copy his security pass.
Although Man on Wire doesn’t explicitly mourn the towers’ destruction many years later on 9/11, its evocation of their stark grandeur and the sheer moxie of the locals (who seem to inhabit an easier-going and more blasé city than what currently exists) assisting Petit in his adventure is more than testimony enough.
Title: Man on Wire
Director: James Marsh
Studio: Magnolia Pictures
Year of release: 2008
Web site: http://manonwire.com/
(A version of this review was originally published in 2008 at filmcritic.com)
