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"The Walk" is a film that offers viewers a highly questionable first act, a second
that, while technically proficient, has been done before and better and a third
that provides some of the most spellbinding and audacious moments of pure visual
storytelling in recent memory. In other words, your enjoyment of it will depend
to a large extent on whether you think that the absolute triumph of its last 20
minutes or so are enough to make up for the occasional missteps of the first
100. To these eyes, they do.
During its short lifespan, the original World Trade Center hosted a number of
strange and surreal occurrences but perhaps none was more astonishing than the
tight wire walk by Frenchman Philippe Petit. The event took place during the
morning of August 7, 1974 and lasted 45 minutes with Petit risking life and limb
1370 feet up to traverse a 200-foot long cable bridging the span between the
Twin Towers. Recounting his tale from a perch atop the Statue of Liberty, Petit
first discusses his early years, beginning from when he first witnesses a
tightrope act at a circus and discovered what would become his obsession. This
would lead him to the leader of the circus, Papa Rudy (Ben Kingsley), who would
share with him the tricks that he had learned during a lifetime in the tightrope
trade, though at a cost. Petit begins his career on the streets of Paris, where
he acquires a small fan base and the love of street musician Annie (Charlotte Le
Bon) and first tastes defeat when a walk over a small lake ends in failure.
Undaunted, he moves on to a more audacious plan and successfully strings a wire
between the belfries of the cathedral at Notre Dame--though he is arrested
afterwards, the stunt is otherwise a triumph all around.
The real dream for Petit is to go to New York and somehow do the exact same
thing at the World Trade Center, something that has been gnawing at him ever
since seeing a picture of the under-construction buildings in a magazine. Now
that the buildings are almost completed, the time has come to do it and Petit,
along with Annie and two other accomplices, photographer Jean-Louis (Clement
Sibony) and agoraphobic mathematician Jeff (Cesar Domboy), set off for New York.
Petit, aided by a number of disguises, begins casing all areas of the two
buildings in order to create a plan of attack and suffers a nasty injury along
the way when he steps on a nail at a construction site. Along the way, he
acquires a couple of additional American acquaintances, including an electronics
salesman (James Badge Dale) and an insurance salesman who actually recognizes
Petit from the Notre Dame stunt and possesses an element that makes him an
essential part of the team-- an office in the North Tower where people can hide
until nightfall. Once that happens, Petit and his group struggle to get
everything set up without attracting the attention of security guards or of
anyone below in the streets. Spoiler Alert--it finally gets done in the nick of
time and Petit at long last steps off the roof of the South Tower and into the
history books.
Even after putting all the technical challenges of trying to recreate Petit's
walk in cinematic terms aside for the time being, anyone daring to bring this
story to the screen would have to face no less than three major obstacles that
might have caused most people to bow out immediately. For starters, the film
tells a true story that everyone pretty much knows the ending of, even if they
may not exactly know all of the details of how it get there. More significantly,
it is a story that has already been told before in "Man on Wire," the
extraordinary 2008 documentary that told the entire story of Petit's mad dream
through a combination of interviews with the participants, archival footage and
reenactments. Finally, there is the inescapable fact that any movie made today
that involves the World Trade Center has to in some way deal with the fact that,
unlike the characters on the screen, we are painfully aware of the tragic fate
of those two towers. With his fascination for dealing with popular culture of
the latter half of the 20th century, his willingness to experiment with new
technologies to give viewers sights that they have never seen before and his
sheer audacity as a filmmaker, Robert Zemeckis was probably the perfect choice
to attempt to transform Petit's story into a narrative feature.
In a way, Zemeckis is attempting to do the same thing that Petit did more than
four decades earlier--he is trying to dazzle and stun audiences with a bit of
performance that could end disastrously if something goes terribly wrong--and
like Petit, he encounters a number of problems along the way. One big problem is
that the first two-thirds of the film are really uneven from a dramatic
standpoint. The stuff in Paris charting Petit's early days goes on for a long
time and while there are a few cute elements here and there--Gallic versions of
then-contemporary pop hits and an argument between Petit and Annie that is done
in mime--it doesn't really bring anything to the table. The stuff in New York
involving Petit and the subterfuge that he employed to infiltrate the buildings
and prepare for his stunt is livelier but anyone who happened to see "Man on
Wire"--which treated this aspect of the story like a breathlessly exciting heist
film--will find themselves thinking that the earlier film did it in a far more
gripping and engaging manner. This is not to say that Zemeckis muffs this
part--a lot of this section is quite fun indeed--but compared to what "Man on
Wire" was able to accomplish despite a presumably much smaller budget, it can't
help but come up a little short.
And yet, all those problems are cast aside once Petit gets on the wire and
Zemeckis gives viewers the nearly 20-minute-long money shot that they have been
clamoring to see. Although Zemeckis doesn't hurry this portion of the movie, it
doesn't play out in real time. (It takes about 20 minutes instead of the full
45.) There's a surprising amount of tension for an event whose outcome is
well-documented and this ability to wring suspense from a chunk of established
history is proof of the filmmaker's aptitude. Whatever flaws The Walk exhibits
in the early-going are more than counterbalanced during the second half. Using
an array of cinematic tricks, Zemeckis and cinematographer Dariusz Wolski have
created a stunner of a sequence that manages to keep viewers on the edge of
their seats even though they presumably know how it turns out in the end thanks
to a series of seemingly impossible camera moves and angles that put viewers
directly in Petit's shore at certain points. There have been reports from early
screenings that some viewers have become physically ill from some of the visual
flourishes designed to remind viewers of how high Petit is working--a
development that probably warmed Zemeckis's William Castle-loving heart--but
despite having a pronounced thing about heights, I personally never felt queasy
but those with vertigo-like tendencies might want to think twice about seeing
it. Throughout his career, Zemeckis has pushed the boundaries of what filmmaking
technology is capable of and the wire-walking sequence seen here is destined to
go down as one of his best. Does the 3D help? Almost certainly. A big screen,
however, is mandatory. The Walk is another in a growing number of films that
will have a muted impact in an average home theater and isn't worth seeing on a
tablet or phone.
There are no acting Oscar nominations waiting in the wings for The Walk. Joseph
Gordon-Levitt does a solid job portraying Philippe but, even in his best
moments, he plays second fiddle to the Twin Towers and Zemeckis' wizardry. The
Walk deserves a boatload of technical awards - it's a triumph of special effects
and should be recognized as such. It's two-thirds of a great film but the slow
start and unremarkable first hour hold it back. Still, for those who buy into
the precept that "good things are worth waiting for," The Walk unquestionably
delivers. "The Walk" is a good film that yearns to be great but never quite
manages to reach such heights until the knockout conclusion. As a human drama,
it has elements that don't work, subplots that go nowhere. On the other hand, it
does manage to understand why a person would voluntarily put themselves in such
a dangerous position, it gives all the thrills and jolts that a viewer can
handle during its climax and it essentially serves as an elaborate and
family-friendly hymn to the power of imagination and the memory of the World
Trade Center. For 27 years, the World Trade Center was viewed as implacable and
impervious - even the detonation of a bomb in its guts did no lasting harm. This
is the image Zemeckis recreates. His Twin Towers are as tangible as the real
ones were. Not since King Kong have the buildings received this much screen time
and, when John Guillerman rolled cameras in 1975-76, he wasn't forced to rely on
computer-generated reconstructions. Yes, "Man on Wire" is an essential film--one
that should be required viewing for anyone watching this one--but while a lesser
enterprise, "The Walk" is still exciting enough to warrant a recommendation.
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