James Marsh’s great documentary Man on Wire, about the French acrobat Philippe Petit and his magnificent 1974 wire walk between the towers of New York’s World Trade Center was a healing act: a celebration of Petit’s act of love to cancel the act of hate on 9/11. Petit missed a single trick: he omitted to get cine film of the event, and now Robert Zemeckis has tried to rectify this with a heartfelt and extremely entertaining Imax-3D fiction feature based on the event.
It reproduces pretty faithfully what Marsh got on the record, though tactfully removing the fact that Petit was afterwards unfaithful to his French girlfriend Annie by having a fling with an American fan. This is a family movie, after all. Joseph Gordon-Levitt does an intelligent, conscientious job playing Petit: alert, focused, with decent French, though maybe he doesn’t capture the childlike, unworldly quality that emerged in Marsh’s film. Ben Kingsley is Petit’s irascible old circus mentor Papa Rudy; Charlotte Le Bon is Annie and that notable acting chameleon James Badge Dale plays a French-speaking New Yorker who helps Petit and his crew infiltrate the building. The great wire-walk scenes themselves are really tense, vertiginous and very enjoyable. You know he survives in the end – like General de Gaulle at the end of The Day of the Jackal – but it doesn’t stop it being exciting. Zemeckis has specialised in plane-crash drama in movies such as Cast Away (2000) and Flight (2012). His brand of high anxiety has a different outcome now.
