The Walk, a brilliant new film from Robert Zemeckis, tells Petit's amazing story.Philippe Petit’s famous walk on 7 August 1974 took 45 minutes to complete but was six years in the making. True to its protagonist, the film opens with maximum cheese, as Petit breaks the fourth wall and narrates from a location that we realize is the torch of the Statue of Liberty.The film is full of Petit’s voice – the screenplay was adapted by Zemeckis and Christopher Browne from his memoir, To Reach the Clouds – and Gordon-Levitt delivers his lines in an, ‘ow you say, vair prononced Franch acksong. It’s over-the-top – sometimes wildly and hilariously so – and entirely of a piece with the film’s antic showmanship. The film begins in earnest in Paris, with an image of the Eiffel Tower reflected, upside-down, in a puddle. (Straight away, Zemeckis turns the world upside down.). Paris 1973 is where Petit begins to plan his coup – he sees an illustration of the as-yet unbuilt towers in a magazine in a dentist’s waiting room, and decides on the spot what he has to do. As the movie flashes back to Petit’s childhood, his apprenticeship with a circus showman (Ben Kingsley), and his romance with a cute street musician (Charlotte Le Bon), Zemeckis and cowriter Christopher Browne inflate the story with a dirigible’s worth of hot air and whimsy. As in musicals, where the act of singing is treated as commonplace, the tone is artificial. We know we’re watching a prankster and we’re encouraged to play along with the con. One sequence is shot in black and white with only a dollop of color. In an early high-wire scene, the pole slips from Petit’s hands and spears straight through the right lens of our 3-D glasses. The wire on which Philippe Petit crossed between the two buildings of the World Trade Center on the morning of August 7, 1974, was held up by the towers themselves, stabilised with guy lines lashed to carefully chosen points around their edges, and secured around wooden bulwarks on either sideRobert Zemeckis’s glimmering dream of a film takes two buildings that have become emblematic of everything that’s frightening and uncertain about 21st century life in the West and redeems them. It turns Petit’s stunt, which was one hundred percent illegal, and completed without a harness, into a kind of pre-emptive retort to the attacks of September 11, 2001 – a reminder that beauty, fun and the irresistible human impulse to create are the stuff that dissolves terror on contact.When the walk itself begins, after around 90 minutes, everything else – the earlier scenes, the screen, the cinema – just melts away. As Petit first steps out shortly after 7am, the screen becomes a Magritte canvas: a single line stretching off into rosy clouds. But then the skies clear, the ground drops away, and Petit is up there, and so are you.But, as Wallenda said, life is on the wire and The Walk ultimately proves it. Those vertiginous 16 minutes and the few that follow are among the most exhilarating in recent memory, including a poignant tribute to the towers and a city still standing. The final image is Zemeckis' own high-wire triumph, blending tech and heart into a beautiful thing.The sequence that makes the rest endurable is the walk itself. The very-high-wire sequence is genuinely gasp-inducing. See it in 3D on the largest screen available.
What matters is the wire, and the man on it; the void below, and his sheer infectious joy as he conquers it. The film, and Gordon-Levitt, shines in this final act, as we watch, with our hearts in our mouths, breath suspended, waiting for him to come back safely to the other side.
The Walk is best and most easily enjoyed for its amusing characters, get-up-and-go pace, and clever computer-generated aesthetics (nifty forced perspectives through papers, seamless camera trickery — this list in particular could go on). The film is a three cheers kind of jaunt; vintage, loony, and at times heartfelt.
Here, Zemeckis never misses. The camera swirls patiently, overhead, underneath, always in the right place. As if depicting a tightrope walk wasn’t an elevated enough experience, Zemeckis, the whiz, makes sure you feel every last sensation courtesy of computer generated wonder
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