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'The Walk' a towering movie experience
Robert Zemeckis brings to the screen a higher movie experience, balancing his storytelling and technical brilliance in the story of a legendary high-wire walker
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obert Zemeckis brings to the screen a higher movie experience, balancing his storytelling and technical brilliance in the story of a legendary high-wire walker.
The Walk is a fact-based drama about Philippe Petit, a tightrope walker who made the historic aerial walk between the Twin Towers on Aug. 7, 1974.
And that was the longest 43 meters ever.
French street artist Petit (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) started his journey to the 'artistic coup' of the century a year earlier in Paris as he accidentally stumbled up on a magazine article in a dentist's waiting room after trying to bite a jawbreaker.
His obsession of finding perfect spots to hang his wires kept his dream alive and drove him to gather coconspirators for the daredevil stunts.
The first to join the unlikely team was guitar-strumming street artist Annie Allix (Charlotte Le Bon), his love interest, followed by English-speaking amateur photographer Jean-Louise (Clément Sibony).
As a warm-up, Petit walked on a wire the mini team placed clandestinely between the turrets of Notre-Dame Cathedral. It was a successful stunt that cost him a day in jail and fear about the lack of knowledge about tying the ropes safely.
From here onwards, things build in a well-controlled pace toward the climax, the walk itself.
Director Robert Zemeckis, who shared the screenplay credit with Christopher Browne in the adaption of real-life Petit's memoir To Reach the Clouds, put all the elements of a perfect-heist type of movie into The Walk.
With the help of Papa Rudy (Ben Kingsley), a circus wire walker who mentored Petit, the team started to draw up a detailed plan on how to get into the World Trade Center with their sizable equipment.
More people joined the merry band, including Jean-Francis or Jeff (Ben Schwartz) ' a school math teacher with a fear of heights ' life insurance agent headquartered at one of the towers Barry Greenhouse (Steve Valentine), who had been a fan of Petit since the Notre-Dame stunt, and New York electronics shopkeeper Jean-Pierre (James Badge Dale).
While the audience will have enough scenes of Gordon-Levitt walking on wires hung in different high places in the first part of the film, the following part focuses on the science of it to show that tightrope-walking is not only about being fearless or being born with perfect balancing skills.
From the start, Zemeckis throws out an impressive display of 3-D filmmaking that makes you automatically lean aside to dodge a blow, before cursing.
But when the titular walk itself starts, the technological magic shifts into a strange, eerie void that perhaps only exist at a height of 110 meters above the ground as the towers, the bird's eye view of New York in the morning, the blue sky and the clouds disappear ' leaving only Petit and his balancing baton.
It was the moment Petit declined to let go until he surrendered to the police in a moment of comic relief.
The film is all about showmanship, which was missed out in the 2008 documentary Man on Wire by James Marsh and is embodied by Gordon-Levitt.
He narrates the story while perching on the hilt of the torch of the Statue of Liberty ' much higher than the observation deck, providing context and tension to the storytelling with his gestures, facial expressions and choice of words with a Parisian accent he learned on set from Le Bon and other French actors.
Petit himself became a mentor for Gordon-Levitt who did his first walk in eight days and continued training during shooting.
Although the supporting characters were not as developed as Petit's, their presence brought humanity and humor to the drama.
The cinematographic crew brought to life the tallest skyscrapers of the time with a nearly impossible perpendicular angle zooming along the façades of the towers.
There were hints of lax security while the towers were still under construction, although of course that has nothing to do with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that had brought the iconic buildings to the ground years later.
Showing in local cinemas since Oct. 7, The Walk is a 123-minute film that is both enthralling and dizzying (if you are scared of heights, consider yourself warned) and truly elevates the moviegoing experience.
