In 1974, a young French tight-rope walker secretly rigged a wire between the two World Trade Center towers in New York and wended his way between them in about an hour. Phillipe Petit’s suicidal act of defiance and skill was the subject of James Marsh’s fascinating 2008 documentary Man on Wire. Marsh gave a measure of Petit’s flamboyant personality and celebrated the poetry of his performance, which was especially poignant in hindsight, given that the towers had been destroyed in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Robert Zemeckis’s version treats Petit’s achievement as an eye-popping stunt that is perfectly suited for the 3D-IMAX crowd. The director’s proven ability to meld special effects into formulaic dramas (Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Polar Express) produces a series of dazzling and dizzying scenes of Petit (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) making his precarious journey on high. The special effects department excels in the scenes in which Petit begins his crossing: we see New York City as it appears from his vantage point, and follow his audacious 45-minute performance, during which he dances, salutes the onlookers far below, and rests his back on the wire.
The 123-minute plot retraces Petit’s early training lessons in tightrope walking from Ben Kingsley playing a circus performer, his enduring dream of walking between the towers after he reads about them in a magazine, and the painstaking preparations he makes along with his friends for what he calls “the coup”. The ease with which the team surveys the towers is a testament to less-paranoid times, but the bonhomie between the characters is forced and merely a time-filler until the moment Petit gingerly takes the first of many steps towards possible death – or glory.
Zemeckis’s coldly efficient, all-method-no-madness approach might not give much of a sense of the man on the wire, but it does bring viewers heart-stoppingly close to the physical experience of being dozens of floors above the ground and only a few below the sky. Many of the shots have been conceptualised to turn ordinary viewers into acrophobics. Not surprisingly, the characterisation suffers, and Gordon-Levitt’s mildly caricatured Frenchman is little more than a stunt artist at the service of computer-generated imagery. The visual trickery is a thing unto itself, and the man on the wire disappears into the mist.
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Robert Zemeckis’s version treats Petit’s achievement as an eye-popping stunt that is perfectly suited for the 3D-IMAX crowd. The director’s proven ability to meld special effects into formulaic dramas (Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Polar Express) produces a series of dazzling and dizzying scenes of Petit (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) making his precarious journey on high. The special effects department excels in the scenes in which Petit begins his crossing: we see New York City as it appears from his vantage point, and follow his audacious 45-minute performance, during which he dances, salutes the onlookers far below, and rests his back on the wire.
The 123-minute plot retraces Petit’s early training lessons in tightrope walking from Ben Kingsley playing a circus performer, his enduring dream of walking between the towers after he reads about them in a magazine, and the painstaking preparations he makes along with his friends for what he calls “the coup”. The ease with which the team surveys the towers is a testament to less-paranoid times, but the bonhomie between the characters is forced and merely a time-filler until the moment Petit gingerly takes the first of many steps towards possible death – or glory.
Zemeckis’s coldly efficient, all-method-no-madness approach might not give much of a sense of the man on the wire, but it does bring viewers heart-stoppingly close to the physical experience of being dozens of floors above the ground and only a few below the sky. Many of the shots have been conceptualised to turn ordinary viewers into acrophobics. Not surprisingly, the characterisation suffers, and Gordon-Levitt’s mildly caricatured Frenchman is little more than a stunt artist at the service of computer-generated imagery. The visual trickery is a thing unto itself, and the man on the wire disappears into the mist.
