Man On Wire (2008)--4/5

On a TV screen, “Man on Wire” is merely disconcerting. In a theater, it must be terrifying. Early in the morning of August 7, 1974, Phillippe Petit walked on a wire between the World Trade Center towers, the then-tallest buildings in the world, for forty-five minutes.

James Marsh smartly frames “Man on Wire” as a heist film. With equal parts subterfuge and luck, Petit and three associates (two in each tower) lugged almost one ton of equipment to the buildings’ roofs. In each tower, they had to hide silently for hours from patrolling security guards. Once on the roof, fishing line attached to a launched arrow became the first in a series of ever-larger threads and ropes passed back and forth. Shortly before dawn, they struggled to pull the heavy wire slack.

In equal measures, Marsh uses talking-head interviews, period stock footage, reenactments, home video, and media imagery of the event. The resulting collage leaves no detail or feeling unexplored. Petit alone is an entertaining interview subject. What boggles the mind is the depth of footage captured before and during the planning of “le coup,” as they called the stunt. Any bullet point made by him or one of his associates has corresponding sixteen millimeter footage from the 70’s.

In “Man on Wire,” no mention is given—or needed—of 9/11. The mere sight of the towers—not to mention the danger and illegality of the stunt—is reminder enough. A split-screen montage of their construction paired with Petit’s childhood attests to the temporal nature of our creations. Petit has outlived the towers and, at sixty, is still a spry, larger-than-life character.