The Walk

The Walk is this year’s Gravity. Certainly, our acrobatic tightrope walker, Philippe Petit (played with pixieish charm by Joseph Gordon- Levitt), defies the elemental force of Earth’s gravitational nature to teeter between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in Robert Zemeckis’s jolly, breathtaking 3D dramatisation of the Oscar-winning documentary Man On Wire.

That terrific film, directed by James Marsh, doesn’t get a mention at all. The source credit goes to Petit’s own book, leading to the film’s narration device of the puckish Petit recounting the whole story from atop the Statue of Liberty. I didn’t mind this conceit at all. JGL does very well with the French accent and his voiceover lets us into the mind of this artistically brave yet naive and deluded dreamer of an individual.

There may be a touch too much mime, unicycle and French circusing for some tastes, but Zemeckis (perhaps the world’s most underrated director) makes the Paris sections feel very Amélie-like, idyllic even, with cute clichés such as Petit wooing the pretty Annie (Charlotte Le Bon) by constructing a model of his wire walk over dinner using two wine bottles as the Twin Towers.

Zemeckis (Back To The Future, Forrest Gump, Cast Away, to name just a few) has a knack for combining wit and hokeyness (eg, Ben Kingsley as a veteran circus man named Papa Rudy) with special effects that become part of the fabric of the story. And, with this in mind, I urge you to see The Walk in 3D.

The movie probes ideas of performance and art as well as the philosophy of dreams. ‘Without an audience, there’s no show,’ says Papa Rudy. And who’s going to see a man walking a wire 1,000ft above the ground in the New York skies? Hence the framing narration device, which romanticises all the build-up to what, in his own head, Petit sees as the ‘greatest artistic coup of the century’.

Zemeckis changes tone in the New York section, creating a breezy heist movie that pastiches those great NY movies of the 1970s, such as The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three. It’s exciting enough, but when we get up to the top of the towers, the film, and the effects, take flight.

My stomach performed a round turn and two half hitches as JGL and his ‘accomplices’ stood on the roofs of the North and South towers. The views are immaculately recreated – I went up the towers once and I remember the dizziness as well as the vista – while the sheer elegance of the feat comes to the fore. But as Petit’s feet dance across the void, I felt as if my tummy had fallen into my pants – it was like being on a roller coaster.

As he moves forward on the tightrope, JGL’s face is in a state of bliss. ‘I experienced an intense joy, a profound satisfaction,’ Petit recalls. He tiptoes through the clouds, while the morning rush hour goes on below, prompting something of Bruegel’s painting Landscape With The Fall Of Icarus to came to my mind: a spectacular, God-provoking feat, accomplished while no one really notices. When police do arrive and helicopters circle him with loudhailers, Petit just keeps on his tightrope long enough to ensure his ‘coup’ gets the attention it merits.

Zemeckis’s film cements the 1974 event as popular history and as part of New York’s ever-evolving city lore, as much as those now-disappeared Towers still haunt the landscape and the sky space. ‘You gave them a soul,’ breathes Annie to Petit.

I don’t know. Petit is all about giving himself his dues. It’s taken him this long to get affirmation, to see his act brought to life and acknowledged as part of New York history. I’ve met him and he is a curious, wide-eyed, street performer of a fellow, the man who balanced his Oscar on his chin. He’s a poet of his own universe, always chasing a ‘ta-dah’ finish, a ‘compliment’ to the audience even if there isn’t one to witness his self-perceived brilliance.

Perhaps Zemeckis sees something of himself in Petit? The director’s cinematic achievements have often gone under-appreciated for their quiet subversion, their visual radicalism. Both are restless storytellers with eyes on grand gesture and high spectacle, but with The Walk, both should now be recognised as masters of their art.