A Brief Review of Man on Wire, an Excellent Film

Phillipe Petit, the Frenchman who eventually walked between World Trade Center’s two roofs on a tightrope, met his strange destiny early on. As a teenager, he leafed through a magazine in a dentist’s office waiting room and saw a rendering of the planned Twin Towers. As he tells it, that moment changed his life. It was the starting point of a journey that culminated in 1974, a quarter mile above the streets of New York City’s Financial District.

Man on Wire depicts this journey. In doing so, it shows itself to be one of the most unique documentaries I have seen in a long time. It is also the best post-9/11 work yet, and it doesn’t even address 9/11. The film knows that the towers are gone, and why, and it knows that its audience knows. But the filmmakers allowed 9/11 to remain implicit, and for once, the elephant in the room is more profound for being just that. The World Trade Center attacks have been so over-dramatized at this point that to say nothing about them seems to say the most. It shows us what was best about them, knowing that we will feel the sense of loss on our own.

Instead of addressing the attacks, the film lingers on the extremes created by the towers, both as they were built and once they were finished. In doing so, it renders them more majestic than they probably ever really were.

The most extreme of these extreme images are, of course, the ones that feature Petit scaling the tightrope. They put a viewer in awe of human potential. More than one grown person cries during the recounting of the Petit’s walk. People kept asking Petit why he did it, and he said there was no why. To ask why was to ruin it. It was simply because it would be beautiful, and larger than life, and because he could.

The filmmakers take the fullest advantage of the resources at their disposal. Petit makes a magnificent interview subject; his enthusiasm and wacky intellectual Frenchness make him hard to resist, and he is smartly allowed to ramble on all he wants. The editors also have a wicked sense of comedic timing (I never realized how funny editing could be), like when one of the guys who was helping Petit plan the stunt explains that at the time he wasn’t opposed to things that weren’t necessarily legal. The film immediately cuts to a photo of the guy at the time, looking every ounce a person with an antagonistic relationship to the law.

The film combines interviews, archival footage, and reenactments to build the suspense and to showcase the complexity of the scheme. Many people, years of planning, and two attempts went into making the walk an ultimate success. Indeed, Man on Wire is designed like a heist film – the fascinating plot is more complex than Ocean’s 11, and the prize just as unrealistic. Except that it really happened.