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Review: “Man on Wire”
By Kyle | July 24, 2008
KISS THE SKY
Note: this film opens on July 25
Kyle Smith review of “Man on Wire”
PG-13/94 minutes
In 1974, a detachment of international desperadoes carrying a bow and arrow sneaked into the World Trade Center intent on committing an illegal act of beauty.
What exactly they succeeded in doing might not have been clear until the arrival of “Man on Wire,” James Marsh’s sublime docudrama about a 135 pound serving of undiluted mischief who dreamt of walking across the sky.
Phillippe Petit was the rubbery athlete who strung a cable between the Twin Towers that August day in 1974. His tale—a giddy dream, a suspenser, a harrowing surreal comedy of the possible–is like “Dog Day Afternoon” as told by Amélie.
The teen Petit was sitting in a dentist’s office when he read an article about the gestating World Trade Center and met his destiny. Eight years would go by, but he would—must—figure out how to sneak into the buildings, how to case the joint, recruit accomplices and fling a steel cable across 200 feet of nothing to connect the two towers. Walking the wire—despite the ruthless winds that swirl through the area—would be the easy part. He called his action “The Coup.”
On his team were an inside man with a Dali mustache and a fellow known as Alan who took the deep cover of the code name Albert. One co-conspirator adopted a cunning disguise: “To look like an American I had lots of pens in my pocket.” An accomplice confesses that he was high while the team was still on the ground floor, having taken to smoking grass every day for 35 years.
The beauty of Marsh’s scheme sneaks up on you; he begins with mock-epic music and straight-faced bank-job details of the Petit gang’s plan to heist New York’s attention. He relies on intentionally comic reenactments shot in black and white–smudgy, heady, expressionistic black and white sequences like something out of Fritz Lang.
Somewhere along the line, though, you realize you’ve been had. The story isn’t a mock epic, it’s a real, if miniature, one, about a son of Icarus who would salute the gods on their own level. Petit is not a madman or a conman but a Frenchman. “If I die,” he thought, “what a beautiful death.” When asked why he acted, he said, “There is no why.”
The footage of the Trade Center being pieced together in the late 60s is itself a thing of splendor, as is the scene showing Petit, who in the 1970s looked like Malcolm McDowell in “A Clockwork Orange,” training in an impossibly bucolic meadow in France. He capers across a practice wire as his friends gleefully yank and jostle either end to simulate the moods of unkind winds.
The fate of the buildings need not be mentioned, and is not. This film is stuck in a moment when the Trade Center was not quite finished, when overwhelmed-looking cops wore fluffy mustaches and Richard Nixon shrank into a fetal position in his lonely bunker.
We see New York City through impish French eyes: our dreary Criminal Court is promoted to “Palais de Justice,” and even the all-night police sirens, the pulse of crime, seem bracingly strange. A friend who spends a lot of time in France once explained to me, of New York, “This is their Paris.”
Petit didn’t just walk across the wire, he spent 45 minutes on it, did eight laps, lay down in the middle, smiled at the cops and finally returned to the planet only when threatened with helicopter assault. We observe the grand act from several points of view, notably that of his girlfriend, who was left complaining on the ground so as not to provide additional distraction. To rip her words out of the original would be like putting Sweet-N-Low in the Chateau Latour, so here they are as she speaks them: C’était tellement, tellement beau. C’était comme il marchait sur un nuage.” For Phillipe Petit, the clouds were his sidewalk.
Topics: Movies, New York City |
July 3rd, 2008 at 11:01 am
Kyle, you know as well as I that security at the WTC is weak. I mean, it must have taken years prior to 9/11/01 for the covert government task forces to sneak in at night and plant C-4 in the walls throughout, spackle, paint, and escape without detection- compared to that task, what Petit did was easy.
July 3rd, 2008 at 1:20 pm
Oh Larry…you silly person. Don’t you know the C4 was planted as the WTC was being built. All the construction workers were in on it.
July 5th, 2008 at 11:53 pm
The film has 2 scenes in it that are made up by the director. The most offensive was when the man on the top during the early morning hours took off his clothes to ‘feel the string’ that had been shot from the other tower. This is an Out Right Lie..it never happened! Why did James Marsh have to make up such a trivial scene when the whole story is so amazing. I was very disappointed to hear that this was the case.