High Wire Act

I recently watched last year's documentary Man on Wire, about Frenchman Phililppe Petit, who in 1974 walked on a tightrope suspended between the two towers of the World Trade Center in New York. I found it interesting that a documentary was crafted out of events that took place nearly 35 years earlier. Doing so presented some definite challenges for the filmmakers.

Early on in the film, I found myself wondering how effective a piece it could really be. Interview subjects were reflecting on events from decades earlier. With such distance in time to grow distant in emotion, how compelling would their stories seem? It didn't take long for that concern to be dispelled. Everyone spoke with an uncanny earnestness, even an immediacy. More than one person is moved to tears as they tell their parts in the tale, and the audience really feels some of that emotion too.

Supplementing the interviews are a good number of re-enactments. Actors have been cast to play key roles, as the young Petit and his team of accomplices plan their big event like a heist. There is no getting permission for this grand stunt. They must somehow sneak into the buildings with all the elaborate and heavy equipment they need, then set up overnight without being discovered by security guards. Here again, the movie surprised me. I expected these bits of fiction to detract from the film. (Well, not fiction, but not truth filmed as it happened, as you'd expect in most documentaries.) Instead, they provide a surprising degree of tension and suspense. Even though you know how it turns out, you do get caught up in the caper.

Less effective are the handful of actual home movies taken as the group practices in the months leading up to the big day. And it has nothing to do with the content of those films, but rather how they are presented. Rather than presenting the footage in its true aspect ratio, it's stretched horizontally to fill the widescreen frame. This is an especially odd choice, since footage of the World Trade Center's construction in the early minutes of the film are presented in true ratio, with black bars on the sides of the frame. One of Petit's personal movies from 1974 runs a full five minutes, but my brain was hurting throughout every second of it, seeing everyone stretched unnaturally.

The ultimate climax is both less and more than what I thought it would be. There's almost no actual footage of Petit's 45 minutes on the tightrope between the buildings, a disappointment after an earlier stunt in the opening act of the film (a tightrope walk between the pylons of a bridge in Sydney, Australia) is shown to us in film taken on the date. The movie's "big moment" is presented mostly in a series of still photos. But at the same time, they are effective photos. The sense of vertigo is made horrifyingly clear in this sequence, and really, all throughout the film. Rarely has a movie evoked so physical a reaction in me.

I've noticed that some reviewers have questioned why there's no mention made in the film of the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001. And frankly, I'm surprised why anyone would wonder about this directorial/editorial decision. This is a film of triumph and exhiliration, and about the past. This is a tale of 1974, and subsequent events have absolutely nothing to do with it.

At least, not with the narrative itself. The fact is, you really can't watch this movie and not think on occasion of how the buildings no longer exist today. Sweeping shots of the buildings, meant to give a sense of scope to events, also reminded me of tourists trips to New York back in the 1990s, when I stood in roughly the same place and saw the things with my own eyes. I think it an effective choice, and the only choice, to leave this sort of thing as subtext in this movie.

I rate Man on Wire a B-. It's a shame there wasn't more material available to make the film, but the filmmakers did a very effective job with what they had.