The Walk

It’s in the inter­est of cin­e­ma that the wire walk under­gone by French philoso­pher-acro­bat Philippe Petit dur­ing the wee hours of 7 August, 1974, between the not-quite-com­plet­ed twin tow­ers of the World Trade Cen­tre, is deemed a beau­ti­ful, intel­lec­tu­al­ly-dri­ven act of dizzy-head­ed pub­lic per­for­mance art and not one of unal­loyed nar­cis­sism. We can nev­er tru­ly know the nature of Petit’s impe­tus, nor whether it can be reduced to such sim­plis­tic bina­ry def­i­n­i­tions. Yet those who have cho­sen to tell this sto­ry do have the habit of nudg­ing the con­ver­sa­tion towards quixot­ic pro­fun­di­ty and away from some­thing that we could nev­er hope to under­stand. Or, at least, they don’t see the beau­ty inher­ent in uncertainty.

In James Marsh’s 2008 doc­u­men­tary, Man on Wire, which detailed the plan­ning and exe­cu­tion of this sky-high ​“be-in”, the walk itself (depict­ed via pho­to­graph­ic stills) was pre­sent­ed to the strains of Erik Satie’s ​‘Gymnopédie No 1’ – a ster­ling post-pro­duc­tion co-min­gling of sound and visu­als, but one which mud­died the emo­tion­al res­o­nance of the infor­ma­tion on screen: were we weep­ing because of the man or the music?

Robert Zemeck­is’ The Walk lays on the car­toon gloss like Vase­line before a marathon, trans­form­ing what some may have chalked up as one man ful­fill­ing an incom­pre­hen­si­ble life’s call­ing into a case of wishy-washy dare­dev­il­ism, a dis­as­ter movie with lit­tle at stake. The film nev­er ques­tions why some­one would do some­thing like this, only why some­one wouldn’t do some­thing like this. In Zemeck­is’ but­tery paws, Petit becomes a stock action hero, a twin­kle-toed dream­er who is pow­ered by nuggets of old-timey wis­dom (c/​o Ben Kings­ley in a pork-pie hat) and screw­ball serendip­i­ty that he acquires along the road to infamy. The moral ambiva­lence that is the trade­mark of some­one such as Jean-Pierre Melville – cinema’s grand mas­ter of depict­ing the cold process of ​“crime” – is sore­ly lacking.

From the off, a tone of light com­e­dy pre­vails, with Joseph Gor­don-Levitt pranc­ing around on the torch of the Stat­ue of Lib­er­ty and tee­ing up his tall tale like a court jester above his sta­tion. There’s the feel­ing that Zemeck­is is in con­stant doubt that his audi­ence might dis­miss this sto­ry as whim­si­cal and incon­se­quen­tial, and so his screen­play – co-writ­ten by Christo­pher Browne and based on Petit’s book, ​‘To Reach The Clouds’ – employs a nar­ra­tion whose pur­pose appears to be to make sure that even a scin­til­la of ambi­gu­i­ty is neu­tralised on sight. Salient details are repeat­ed on numer­ous occa­sions, and Petit says things like ​“we ran up the stairs” as char­ac­ters are seen run­ning up some stairs. The gang refers to the scheme as a ​“coup”, men­tion­ing the term over and over dur­ing their plan­ning pro­ce­dure. Misty-eyed Zemeck­is sees no irony in their roman­tic descrip­tors, instead tak­ing them at face val­ue as a way to make his film appear more rad­i­cal than it is.

The most bemus­ing aspect of The Walk, how­ev­er, is how dis­con­cert­ing­ly arti­fi­cial every­thing looks, feels and sounds. There are even a cou­ple of direct ref­er­ences to the Clock Tow­er finale of Back to the Future, as fall­en cables need to be hasti­ly re-hoist­ed as the sun ris­es and dead­lines loom. Per­haps there’s a con­vinc­ing counter argu­ment to made to this sug­ges­tion, but Petit’s sto­ry is only incred­i­ble because it was a real thing that hap­pened. Yes, a human per­son actu­al­ly car­ried out that wacky stunt. The man­ner in which this mate­r­i­al is pre­sent­ed, like a pres­tige fan­ta­sy on an expan­sive IMAX can­vas and always recog­nis­able as a piece of immac­u­late­ly-pol­ished screen fic­tion, removes that thrilling, dan­ger­ous link to real­i­ty. Zemeck­is is a fab­u­list, not a real­ist, and as we saw with a film like Flight, he’s far more com­fort­able invent­ing real­i­ty than he is authen­ti­cat­ing it.

The doc­u­men­tary ver­sion of this sto­ry pre­sent­ed a real per­son, and per­haps its own ​“coup” was cul­ti­vat­ing a sense of life-or-death dan­ger even though we could plain­ly see that this guy lived to tell the tale. Through the mire sat­u­rat­ed colours, nov­el­ty cam­era moves, the 3D-enhanced birds’-eye views, Alan Silvestri’s all-the-feels score and Levitt’s Pep­py le Pew accent, actu­al human dan­ger nev­er enters in to the equa­tion. It’s so car­toon­ish that, if in this ver­sion Petit did lose his cool and plum­met those 110 floors, the ground would’ve like­ly been revealed as rub­berised – like some­thing out of Who Framed Roger Rab­bit – and vault­ed him straight back up there.

Zemeck­is has spo­ken about the desire to show this act that no-one bar its key par­tic­i­pants got to wit­ness from close prox­im­i­ty. He even wants to attempt to emu­late what it felt like for Petit to be out there on the wire. And yet in doing so, he makes it seem less mirac­u­lous, trans­form­ing it into a banal act, achiev­able by mor­tals. Even the spec­ta­cle itself has its edges dulled, as once it hap­pens, it’s then replayed (to expo­nen­tial lev­els of tedi­um) over and over.

One pleas­ing trace of sub­tle­ty, how­ev­er, is the deci­sion not to direct­ly allude to the even­tu­al fate of the tow­ers. In train­ing the focus on Petit and his qua­si-erot­ic rela­tion­ship to these two urban totems (he cer­tain­ly seems to pre­fer them to love-inter­est Annie Allix, played by Char­lotte Le Bön), Zemeck­is cel­e­brates what these build­ings meant then as a way to talk about what they mean now. His film is about dual­i­ty of func­tion – how two office blocks which came to exist as a sym­bol of west­ern cor­po­rate malaise can be recon­tex­tu­alised as a gigan­tic cir­cus big top for an escapist dandy. And that’s some­thing you can nev­er destroy.