Review - Man on Wire
“Man On Wire” is the elegant telling of the particulars behind the legend of Phillipe Petit, the high wire artist who won fame by walking between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. Built around interviews with the participants and accentuated by reenactments, the film is much more than a summation of the process that found Petit performing the world’s deadliest high wire act, though it accomplishes that task masterfully. It is also a meditation on the heights of madness and friendship in achieving impossible dreams, of cults of personalities as means to success and of fame as the final act of creation that will lead to inevitable degeneration.
Petit credits the Twin Towers for starting him off in tightrope walking in the first place. An encounter in a newspaper of a structure not yet completed captured his imagination and he began a regimen that would see him pull high wire stunts in places like the Sydney Harbor Bridge in Australia as he worked his way up to his ultimate dream. Along the way, he amassed a cadre of helpers and admirers and, upon his entry into America to begin preparing for the World Trade Center, a few more bumblers and oddballs.
In the careful reconstructions of the preparations to the highwire moment, the film can, at times, resemble “Ocean’s Eleven” — more the original than the Clooney version. There are moments, though, where it’s just as much like the old Jim Hutton film “Who’s Minding The Mint” where an innocent caper of good intentions goes out of control. As related by Petit and his co-horts, the processes by which they cased the joint — they even pretended to be foreign news journalists at one point in order to get images of the roof to find anchor points — are hilarious and tense. The filmmaking is of such a high standard that even though you know how it’s going to end, you are on the edge of your seat unable to imagine how this is all going to work out.
At the same time, the mysticism within which the participants wrap their relationships with Petit is infectious. Petit himself comes off as a consummate artist and con man, an animated storyteller and energetic self-mythologizer. It’s easy to see how this man could convince such disparate people that, yes, he was going to connect a wire between the Twin Towers and walk it and he needed their help to do so.
The story is propelled into a higher plane by the three-point production mastery of director James Marsh, cinematographer Igor Martinovic and editor Jinx Godfrey. They create an alluring swirl that overtakes you with its mystery and magic, drawing you into the center of the moment in a close approximation of what it must have been like to have your mind racing towards the possibility of this singular moment. Completely the ambience is the precise, haunting soundtrack culled from the music by Michael Nyman, which captures the planning and execution, the danger and the thrill and, most importantly, the mystery of what goes on in Petit’s mind.
In concocting his stunt and committing a minor crime by enacting it — trespassing — Petit managed to do something that so many performance and contemporary artists attempt. Petit created a perfect shared moment, a painting of time and emotion. All the planning and art degrees in the world could never stack up against something like that.
In context of shared moments, the World Trade Center has provided us with two, one horrific, one artful. The setting of Petit’s climb gives the film extra profundity — this is, after all, the tale of the conquest of structures that should have been unconquerable, but Petit’s assault was a gentle one and in stark contrast to those that would follow. In some small way, “Man On Wire” gives the audience to reclaim the towers from the terrible memory of 2001 — certainly that can never go away, but Petit’s crazy stunt can give some respite.
One interesting omission from the film is that Petit never talks about the feeling of seeing the towers fall — perhaps it is too painful, perhaps he has none. Perhaps, since from the very beginning he felt as if he owned them, that is the final lesson of the film — he sees himself and his achievement as larger than the towers themselves. He is one small man with an apt and amusing last name who commanded all of New York City, dancing between the commanding structures as if to lighten their impact through some taunting merriment. Or perhaps that’s not it at all. As Petit himself says after a reporter asks him why he did it, “There is no why.”
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