Man On Wire - Review

Director: James Marsh
Starring: Philippe Petit
Runtime: 1 hr 42 minutes

In 1974, the World Trade Center's Twin Towers had just been erected. Across the Atlantic, a young Frenchman named Philippe Petit watched with eager anticipation. He picked August 7th of that year to string a wire from the top of both towers and stroll across it.

When you see him in action, it really does look that easy.

This documentary takes a look at what went into the stunt. Petit had already been arrested (and quickly released) for walking above the bridge in Sydney Harbour, and strolling across a wire atop Notre Dame Cathedral. But when he saw the twin towers in the news, he knew he had to walk between them. It became a dream and an obsession.

It's a great story. A few young friends, a tightrope artist, and some cash for plane tickets and steel cable. That's it. No engineers, no publicity, no celebrity. That would come later. Before August 7th, 1974, Petit was a virtual nobody and besides, he couldn't ask to walk from tower to tower. There wasn't a chance anyone would let him. He just did it.

The film uses old stock footage, some recreations, and a lot of interviews. Petit's interviews are very compelling and you can easily see how he could talk his friends into helping him with what must have looked like suicide. He's an older man in the interviews, but his passion and energy are still alive in his eyes and his voice. He loves the tightrope, and he loves talking about it.

I don't want to spoil the story by giving away the plan. It's not the stuff that secret agent books are made of, but it's a better story for it. There's some cloak-and-dagger involved in getting to the top of the towers in order to string Petit's tightrope, but mostly it's a story of boldness and balls.

The stock footage is good, but it's rare. He performed his feat before 24 hour news, camcorders, and YouTube. Mostly the film uses old photographs that a friend of Petit's took while he was on the wire. Petit ended up walking back and forth about eight times, while the cops waited for him to cool it. He spent 45 minutes up there, walking, kneeling, lying down, and walking some more, all on a wire as thick as your thumb. Incredible. There's one great photograph with Petit standing on the wire, 442 meters above the ground, while over his shoulder the cops are leaning against a post, safe and sound, waiting.

The cops were no dummies. I liked one old interview, where the cop said he realized that he was watching history in the making and seeing something no one else would probably see in their lifetime. The movie owes its title to a New York cop, too. Being cops, they wrote Petit's infraction down as simply "Man on wire" in the police report. That's a great title, and it is a great movie.


One thing did bother me about the film. There is no mention of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, which destroyed the towers in hardly more time than it took Petit to walk between them. Though I hesitate to look at other reviewers before I write my bit, I did this time. As I figured, all of them said it was best that the film left 9/11 out of it. To which I ask: then why are you bringing up its absence in your review? Answer: they thought it was conspicuous by its absence, too.

9/11 screams out as a question for Petit, who I'm sure would have a response. Not for political reasons, but for personal ones. Surely a man who obsessed about the WTC for years, and risked his life to realize a dream, must have had some interesting thoughts about how he felt when he watched the towers crumble. The film spends a lot of time on how he felt when watching them being built. Why nothing when they were destroyed? But then, maybe that's just me. I prefer answers instead of hearing things draped in artsy-talk like "the towers are still alive in our dreams," or some such.

I think most reviewers, Roger Ebert most of all, are very uncomfortable with films (if you can find any) that deal with 9/11. That date is a hole in history for most mediums, whether film, television, or art. Movie reviewers like it that way. Filmmakers seem to share their feelings.

Photos: Yahoo Movies & NY Times