‘Man on Wire’ | 3 ½ stars
By ROBERT W. BUTLER
The Kansas City Star
If “Man on Wire” were fiction it would be hailed as a terrific suspense film, a fascinating character study and an awesome spectacle.
But it’s true, which makes it all the more remarkable. (It opens today at the Tivoli and Leawood.)
In August 1974, New Yorkers arriving at their jobs in the financial district looked up to see a man walking on a cable strung between the rooftops of the still unfinished World Trade Center towers.
The man in midair, a young French acrobat and street performer named Philippe Petit, already had a reputation for sneaking into off-limits buildings (the towers of Notre Dame in Paris, the Sydney Harbour Bridge in Australia), installing a wire and doing stunts while the late-arriving authorities scratched their heads and wondered how to get him down.
But from the moment several years earlier when he heard of plans to build the World Trade Center, Petit became convinced it was his destiny to walk high above Manhattan. After watching this exciting, breathtaking and unexpectedly moving documentary, you’ll have to agree.
Director James Marsh had plenty to work with. For starters there’s Petit himself, a bit worn around the edges at age 59 but still a dynamo of energy, a wonderful raconteur and a born ham. He doesn’t just talk about his past … he acts it out. And he can still traverse a wire with the ease and confidence with which the rest of us venture forth to pick up the morning paper.
Apparently Petit saw himself as a man who was going to make history, because he extensively documented his preparations for “the coup.” He employed movie and still cameras to record his espionage missions into the towers (once posing as a French architectural journalist who wanted to interview the construction workers on the roofs) and his planning sessions back in France, where he built a scale mockup of the towers and practiced on a wire strung over a cow pasture.
Petit’s confederates — especially Jean-Louis Blondeau, the pragmatic friend who more than anyone else was responsible for making the big walk possible, and Petit’s girlfriend at the time, Annie Allix — offer their own personal and often highly emotional remembrances.
Finally there is Marsh’s willingness to bend the documentary rules by filming dreamlike black-and-white re-enactments narrated by the actual participants. Thus we’re with the plotters as they spend hours sitting motionless (hardly daring to breathe) beneath tarps in a construction area while guards sit a few feet away smoking and eating.
We’re there when Blondeau fires an arrow across the chasm, an arrow that pulls a fishing line to allow Petit’s team to haul the heavy cable into position.
The actual walk between the towers wasn’t filmed, but the still photos of the feat — set to Erik Satie’s “Gymnopedie No. 1” and the comments of the participants — are plenty awe-inspiring.
Balancing more than 1,300 feet above the concrete, Petit glided effortless along the cable, moving toward the waiting police but always backing up before they could grab him, lying down on the wire and at one point even holding a conversation with a gull that circled him.
There are more goose bumps here than in any conventional thriller.
And after he was released by the police, Petit somewhat sheepishly informs us, he didn’t celebrate with his confederates and girlfriend. Instead he slept with the first woman who congratulated him … a thumbnail study in the deleterious effects of fame.
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