The tagline for Richard Donner’s Superman in 1978 told viewers who wanted to see the movie that “you’ll believe a man can fly.” Technology moves on, though, and in 2015, an unimaginative publicist for Robert Zemeckis’ The Walk might say to today’s audiences that “you’ll believe a man can walk between the Twin Towers.” Except for one detail; a man actually did walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center while they were still under construction in 1974, a mere four years before Donner’s film.
The man was Philippe Petit, a French high wire artist who qualifies as one of the greatest free spirits of all time. For Petit didn’t just walk between the Towers, not to mention the numerous other feats he’s pulled off in his career, not for money or fame, but for the thrill of it. Petit was the subject of an Oscar winning 2008 documentary, Man on Wire, which probably did the best job possible of describing the high wire artist and the walk itself… with one exception. Because the event took place in 1974, long before the advent of digital video and smartphones, actual footage of the event is extremely limited and doesn’t begin to show just how staggering an accomplishment the walk actually was.
Fortunately, Zemeckis has no such constraints. Instead, he provides about twenty minutes worth of footage depicting the walk (which actually lasted about 45 minutes), showing Petit (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) going back and forth between the Towers multiple times and even, at one point, lying down on the cable to rest. Of course, Zemeckis used CGI effects to recreate the walk, but they are so realistic and breathtaking, especially in 3D, that they might actually cause vertigo for some members of the audience. For many movies, 3D is a bother or, at best, a mild amusement. The only way to truly appreciate what Zemeckis has done in The Walk is to see it in 3D, ideally on a very large screen.
Feature-length films are more than a twenty-minute 3D sequence, however, and Zemeckis (who also co-wrote the movie with Christopher Browne) tries in the remaining 80 minutes of the movie to give the audience a better idea of what made Petit tick and to show how he managed the logistics of his incredible stunt (Petit needed to get a 450-pound, 200 foot cable to the roof of one building and string it over the 140 foot gap between the Towers). Zemeckis succeeds in the latter of his goals considerably better than in the former, and he gets a tremendous boost in that regard through hindsight. For, no matter what New Yorkers in 1974 might have felt about Petit’s stunt, our perspective today has been permanently affected by the events of 9/11, and those events give the film an added level of depth.
The Walk follows Petit from his young days as a street performer in Paris, where he first decided he wanted to be a high-wire artist. He enlisted the help of one of the best teachers in the world, Papa Rudy Omankowsky (Ben Kingsley), head of a distinguished family of circus performers. Rudy trains Petit and also advises him on the finer points of both engineering and showmanship. One day at the dentist’s office, Petit sees an article about the ongoing construction of the Twin Towers, and he pretty much decides on the spot to do the walk.
In real life, Petit spent six years planning what he would refer to as le coup. The film condenses this down to six months but shows Petit’s incredible attention to detail and the inventive ways in which he solved the various problems he faced. Petit wasn’t alone in his preparation; instead, he enlisted the help of his girlfriend Annie (Charlotte Le Bon), Papa Rudy, and a few others. They know their time is limited since they won’t be able to get roof access nearly as easily when the Towers are completed. Fortunately, when they arrive in the United States, they catch a lucky break, meeting a willing accomplice who had seen Petit perform in France and, more important, worked in one of the Towers and could store Petit’s equipment in his offices.
The middle part of The Walk plays like an old-style caper film. At times, some of the incidents seem manufactured, but almost everything shown in the film actually occurred, including a sequence in which Petit and a helper have to sit on a beam hundreds of feet above an open shaft in order to avoid detection by a security guard. By the time Petit and his friends get the cable rigged and secured (a daunting undertaking), the audience feels almost as exhausted as Petit, and the walk itself would almost seem to be an afterthought.
Almost. Because, in the hands of Robert Zemeckis, watching Petit’s walk onscreen is almost as breathtaking as actual footage would have been. Zemeckis has specialized in incredibly complex effects work, including the groundbreaking Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and the Back to the Future trilogy, but this set piece may be his best and one of the most spectacularly realistic effects sequences ever made. Zemeckis keeps it low key, much as Petit himself did, merely walking back and forth a few times with a stop to lie down in the middle that proved far more agonizing for onlookers than for Petit himself (the actual walk was so uneventful that Zemeckis had to invent some wind gusts to add a bit of tension). Petit’s walk may have been low key, but its setting, nearly 1400 feet above the ground, provided all the visual thrill Zemeckis needs here.
While the walk itself was spectacular and the elaborate preparation reasonably suspenseful, the early scenes about Petit’s younger days are far less successful. Certainly, we never really come to grips with why he did his walk (or for that matter, why he bcame a high wire artist in the first place). The answer, which Petit answers in the documentary as well as it can be answered is that there is no answer; it’s simply “because.” Without such a psychological “a ha” moment, The Walk falls back on being a standard, not-that-inspired romance between Gordon-Levitt and Le Bon. And the dramatic scenes in the film are hampered somewhat by Gordon-Levitt’s often comic attempts at a French accent.
The Walk does get a boost from the events of 9/11 in two ways. First, Zemeckis uses as his framing device for the movie periodic narration by Gordon-Levitt from the top of the Statue of Liberty, with the Twin Towers in the background. It’s an obvious ploy, but Petit’s notoriety and psyche are so tied to the Twin Towers that it’s valid. He was given a lifetime pass to the observation decks from which he staged le coup and actually autographed the spot where he stepped off the roof. And, as the film makes clear, his walk is credited with making the Towers much more popular with New Yorkers, who originally found them to be an needlessly expensive showpiece.
The other aspect of the film that’s quite ironic is the building security, which proves woefully (and historically accurately) haphazard. Lax security guards are a staple in caper films, and the performance of those in the movie mimics their real life counterparts, but what is comical in a caper film becomes far more tragic when the audience thinks about the Towers’ eventual fate, thoughts that are inevitable when watching The Walk.
Much as Steve McQueen’s Bullitt is remembered today for its car chase, The Walk is destined to be remembered for its spectacular aerial sequence. There’s actually a good bit more to like about the movie than that sequence, but, unquestionably, this is a movie that needs to be seen in the theater for maximum effect. The Walk is definitely worth the ride to the local multiplex.
