Man on Wire

Another of the nominees for this year's Oscar for Best Documentary Feature is Man on Wire, directed by James Marsh. It chronicles wire-walker Philippe Petit's 1974 "performance" of rigging a cable between the towers of the World Trade Center and walking across them.

The film's greatest success is combining both the step-by-step process of Petit and his confederates pulling off such a stunt (which was completely illegal). Petit, who is still impish close to sixty years old, tells the story in his delightfully French-accented English, and it's clear he is still excited by the whole thing. At several points he likens to it a bank robbery, and the film is often like a caper film such as Rififi, with his friends being given code names: "The Insider," or "The Australian." Moments such as hiding under tarpaulins from guards are told in a suspenseful manner. The explanation of how logistical problems are solved, such as how a secure cable could have possibly been strung 200 feet across, 1,360 feet in the air is told succinctly and competently.

The film also wraps the event in a poetical gauze. Petit was driven by something almost unworldly. He first saw a diagram of the yet unbuilt towers in a dentist's waiting room when he was a teenager, and knew he had to walk between them even then. His passion, as well as those of his friends, comes across quite vividly in Marsh's telling. Petit had no fear of falling--he said that if he did die, it would be a beautiful death, dying while we has following his passion.

However, there are a few things that bother me. For one, it is never explained just how Petit financed this. He's taking planes all over the world and all we know is that he was a street-performer in Paris. It's only in the supplemental materials that we learn that Petit basically passed the hat and relied on donations. Also, there is absolutely no mention that the towers no longer exist. I understand Marsh was not making a movie about their destruction, but I would have liked to hear what Petit's reaction was when he heard the news on September 11, 2001.

Apart from the quality of the film, I'm torn about my reaction to Petit generally. Yes, he is a passionate man, a true artist. But he's also quite selfish in a way. The authorities, including police, are presented in a somewhat buffoonish manner. Petit tied up the law enforcement of a city for almost an hour, and I sympathize with any authority who felt they were made a fool of. On the other hand, he wasn't treated very harshly after his arrest, and the charges were dropped after he gave a free show for kids in Central Park. He was also given a lifetime free pass to the observation deck of the World Trade Center, and some credit him for giving the buildings, which had up to then been seen as gray and ugly monoliths, some character.