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Man on Wire

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by Duncan McDowall
On August 7, 1974, a young Frenchman named Philippe Petit steps out on a wire suspended between the World Trade Center’s twin towers. At 1,350 feet above ground, he dances on the wire with no safety net for almost an hour, crossing it eight times before he is arrested for what becomes known as "the artistic crime of the century." After six years of obsessive planning, Petit became an overnight sensation.

Man on Wire, by director James Marsh, garnered top jury and audience prizes at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival for its brilliant retelling of Philippe Petit’s clandestine highwire act. Marsh boils Petit’s act down to its criminal yet playful essence, and lays out the story like a heist-thriller movie. The result is a portrait of a bank robbery or criminal conspiracy for the good, the planning of which lasts eight years and six months.

Man on Wire is a fascinating watch from many angles. If anything the sheer mechanics of this stunt are enough to get someone to watch the film. How does one casually run a cable between the twin towers? But the real meat of the film, and half its brilliance, revolves rather around Petit’s strategic and meticulous planning for what he and his cohorts came to call “the coup”. The other half, and the very reason it garnered prominent awards at Sundance, is in the film’s masterful telling.
The film is driven by interviews and recollections from Petit and his accomplices. Petit himself is an artist of unusual charm and a very energetic and entertaining raconteur. Had Marsh conceived his film as a single talking-head shot of Petit alone, that would have been enough. But Marsh managed to assemble the entire stunt crew to help balance Petit’s mania, and has them each candidly recount their own part in the masterplan.
Marsh skillfully weaves two timelines into the story: the procedures on the day of, and the six years leading up to, the coup. The day of the coup is illustrated through the very skillful use of staged reconstructions, and from the very beginning the film feels like the windup to a heist-thriller. And unlike many docs including freshly staged action, the line between new and archive is fairly invisible.

The second narrative features old footage of Petit and his crew practicing in a field in France. The footage is playful and amusing, and helps lend the matter its comic and innocent tone - something that is felt right up to the ultimate performance. The wire walk (or dance) itself ends up being a liberating and refreshing act of non-violent criminality, that warrants its place in New York folklore.

Man on Wire is literally wonderful and majestic, and is best suited to a theatrical viewing. Petit and his gang all still seem enveloped in wonder that such a thing could be accomplished. Indeed Petit’s feat seems even more wondrous when you consider that the fragile Frenchman survives while the mighty towers lie in ruins.

In fact, though there are no overt and deliberate associations made with 9/11, one cannot help but draw a connection with the latest perpetration that the twin towers have come to be remembered for. James Marsh is a resident of New York, and perhaps this movie comes as an unconscious reaction to the more somber mood that the towers have come to symbolize, and is his attempt to reclaim a pleasant memory of them.
Dir. James Marsh, USA 2008, 90 mins

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