On August 7, 1974, French high-wire artist Philippe Petit walked on a wire between the two towers of the World Trade Center, 1,350 feet in the air, without a safety net. That act — seemingly psychotic, definitely illegal — was the raison d'être of Petit's life from the moment he read, at age 17, about the plans to build the towers; as he says of that moment in the film, "Now I have acquired my dream." Individual a goal it may be, but it took a team to accomplish it, and in its quest to tell the story of how Petit infiltrated the towers, Man on Wire becomes something of an odd hybrid: an exploration of one man's idiosyncratic vision and a buddy-heist film.
The film is at its best when the focus is on Petit's vision. Director James Marsh — who uses Petit's own photographs and film, as well as reenactments, talking-head interviews, and archival footage — takes us through Petit's early walks between the towers of Notre Dame and of Sydney Harbor Bridge and makes a compelling case for Petit's wire-walk transcending mere circus act to the level of poetry. Petit's co-conspirators — girlfriend Annie Allix, childhood friend Jean-Louis Blondeau, and assorted other friends and ne'er-do-wells — seem to think so, too, and their awe-filled testimony says a lot about why they dropped whatever was happening in their own lives to help Petit carry out what they call "le coup." But the film is less successful when Petit and co. are narrating how they planned "le coup," which included multiple trips from Paris to New York to figure out how to infiltrate the towers, donning various identities to make their way inside, and hiding out from guards once inside the building.
Much of this story is indeed entertaining: there's a tone of lighthearted mischievousness to the plotting and scheming of an illegal act that is essentially harmless, and it's fun to watch as the crew discovers, for example, that the best way to get the wire across the 200-foot span of the towers is to shoot it across with a bow and arrow. But such details are best when judiciously sprinkled, and Man on Wire slathers them on a little too thick. After a while, you lose count of the scouting missions and the mind starts to wander, and to wonder about all the details that Marsh skips over: like, who are these friends in their own right? And where did Petit get the money for all those cross-Atlantic flights, not to mention his equipment? The absolute subversion of everything else — like his friends' own goals and egos — to Petit's high-wire dreams is surely part of the point. But it takes more than obsession to carry out a heist, and elsewhere — such as in the comments of this interview — there are hints of a far richer story.
Still, many of those concerns melt away upon seeing Petit finally up on that wire between the towers, a surprisingly emotional scene that Marsh artfully recreates with still images. Making a film whose central location is the World Trade Center
and skirting the issue of 9/11 is itself something of a high-wire act, so it's particularly remarkable that Man on Wire not only avoids invoking the violence we now associate with those towers, it reanimates them with a sense of joy and wonder. Sure, there's a whiff of death — 1,350 feet is a long way to fall — but even the risk of dying is part of Petit's love of the walk. "If I die," he says, "what a beautiful death, to die in the exercise of your passion."
Copyright © 2008 Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S., Inc.