Philippe Petit had a dream. As a young man in 1960s Paris, the Frenchman saw a magazine advertisement with an artist’s rendering of what the World Trade Center towers, for which ground had just been broken in New York, would look like upon their completion. Instantly the professional high wire walker was smitten. Gliding between the towers would be his greatest triumph. It was as if the towers were being built especially for him. They were to be his greatest stage.
Everything that followed was prelude, preparation for the day, nearly a decade in the future, when Philippe would get the chance to see his dream become reality. There was the Sydney Bridge and the two towers of Notre Dame Cathedral — child’s play compared to what he had envisioned. To pull off his ambitious stunt would require years of planning, numerous international trips, a small army of coconspirators, agents on the inside, fake documents, phony personas, photographic surveillance, helicopter over flights, precise blueprints, model mockups and practice rigging built to scale.
It’s no wonder then that James Marsh’s dazzling documentary Man on Wire plays more like a caper/heist film than a standard litany of events and time frames. If you didn’t know that Philippe and his crew planned only to traverse the space between New York City’s tallest buildings via a minute steel cable, you could easily mistake the film’s set-up as the plotting of errant bank robbers or depraved terrorists.
There were so many unknowns, so many things for which the schemers could not possibly account. So many things could (and did) go wrong. The job required more than simply stringing a single cable across a chasm nearly 1,400 feet high and 200 feet wide. It meant getting thousands of pounds of equipment past armed guards and up 110 floors. It meant adopting cat burglar prowess and not succumbing to the disappointment in ill-fated, aborted attempts. It meant battling the elements and wind so devastating it could sweep a grown man from the rooftop and toss him over the edge onto the street below. It meant trusting a ragtag team of Europeans, Americans and an Australian — many of whom had never even met or spoke each other’s language. How would they perform with a man’s life in the balance?
Philippe’s ambition baffled even those closest to him. His dearest friends thought his plan was insane. But what does it matter if you fall from a hundred feet or a thousand? Death waits for you at the bottom all the same. Philippe is a man of boundless optimism and vision. He sees what is not, what cannot possibly be and commits himself instantly to it. He is unbounded and free-spirited. He also has the concentration of the sphinx. Should he die, he dies in pursuit of his passion. Life, he tells us in a contemporary interview (in which he has lost none of the zest for life, the physical lyricism or the incredulity that defined his youth), is meant to be lived on the edge, skirting the letter of the law, turning the impossible into inspiration, the unthinkable into high art. The worst possible question to ask, he tells us, is, “why?”
Philippe succeeds in his quest — or else why make the film? (Philippe crossed back and forth between the towers a total of eight times and spent nearly an hour balanced atop a steel wire no wider than a quarter.) The hard part was not the act itself. The hard part, and the meat of this luminous film, was the preparation. That this preparation then should be recounted in a manner more akin to the tone of fairy tales than the recitation of ledger books is extraordinary.
Man on Wire is pure poetry, laced with surreal, stylized reproductions so good they will make you wonder if the cameras were not present at the actual events nearly 30 years ago, and stylized reproductions that take on a comical, dreamlike sensibility. The film is supercharged with life, peppered with elements so whimsical (and true) as to be beyond belief. The final result is absolutely breathtaking, a documentary as life-affirming as it is artistically intoxicating. For several captivating minutes we see what it is like to walk on air, an infinitesimal speck, normally lost in the canyons of steel and glass, vaulted now to their level, bound not by gravity but by sheer, relentless determination and majesty. The man who walked that wire came down different, changed, evolutionarily altered.
Man on Wire is not a film about 9/11. It does not reference the tragedy, even in passing. Philippe Petit does not bemoan the loss of his greatest stage or muse about the transitory nature of life. This is not that sort of film. Man on Wire is not about loss, but about what is gained by a life lived to its fullest on the very edge of a tightrope. The result then, mysteriously enough, is the finest closure for those catastrophic events yet made.
© Copyright 2008 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.
