Review: Man on Wire

***** / *****

"To me, it's really so simple, that life should be lived on the edge. You have to exercise rebellion. To refuse to tape yourself to the rules, to refuse your own success, to refuse to repeat yourself, to see every day, every year, every idea as a true challenge. Then you will live your life on the tightrope."

In 1974, a detachment of international desperadoes carrying a bow and arrow sneaked into the World Trade Center in New York City intent on committing an illegal act of beauty. What exactly they succeeded in doing might not have been clear until the arrival of Man on Wire, James Marsh's sublime docudrama about a 135 pound serving of undiluted mischief who dreamt of walking across the sky.

Phillippe Petit was the rubbery athlete who strung a cable between the Twin Towers that August day in 1974, and then gracefully danced across it - with no safety net or harness. His tale - a giddy dream, a suspenser, a harrowing surreal comedy of the possible - is like Dog Day Afternoon as told by Amélie. The teen Petit was sitting in a dentist's office when he read an article about the gestating World Trade Center and met his destiny. Eight years would go by, but he would - must - figure out how to sneak into the buildings, how to case the joint, recruit accomplices and fling a steel cable across 200 feet of nothing to connect the two towers. Walking the wire - despite the ruthless winds that swirl through the area - would be the easy part. He called it" The Coup."

On his team were an inside man with a Dali mustache and a fellow known as Alan who took the deep cover of the code name Albert. One co-conspirator, Petit's best friend Jean-Louis Blondeau, adopted a cunning disguise: "To look like an American I had lots of pens in my pocket." An accomplice confesses that he was high while the team was still on the ground floor, having taken to smoking grass every day for 35 years.

The beauty and ultimate brilliance of Marsh's scheme sneaks up on you; he begins with mock-epic music and straight-faced bank-job details of the Petit gang's plan to heist New York's attention. He relies on intentionally comic reenactments shot in black and white - smudgy, heady, expressionistic black and white sequences like something out of Fritz Lang. Somewhere along the line, though, you realize what you've been offered. The story isn't a mock epic, it's a real, if miniature, one, about a son of Icarus who would salute the gods on their own level. Petit is not a madman or a conman but a Frenchman. "If I die," he thought, "what a beautiful death." When asked "why" by one of the hundreds of reason-obsessed journalists, he said, "There is no why."

The footage of the Trade Center being pieced together in the late '60s is itself a thing of splendor, as is the scene showing Petit, who in the 1970s looked like Malcolm McDowell, training in an impossibly bucolic meadow in France. He capers across a practice wire as his friends gleefully yank and jostle either end to simulate the moods of unkind winds.

The fate of the buildings need not be mentioned, and is not. This film is stuck in a moment when the Trade Center was not quite finished, when overwhelmed-looking cops wore fluffy mustaches and Richard Nixon shrank into a fetal position in his lonely bunker. We see New York City through impish French eyes: the dreary Criminal Court is promoted to "Palais de Justice," and even the all-night police sirens, the pulse of crime, seem bracingly strange. A friend of mine who lives in France once tried to explain to me that New York is like their Paris, but I never really understood that, until today. Man on Wire may be, above all, the story of Petit, but it also may very well be the greatest love letter to New York since Woody Allen turned his back on America.

Petit didn't just walk across the wire, he spent 45 minutes on it. 45 minutes! He did eight laps, lay down in the middle, got down on his knee and saluted the crowd, smiled at the cops and finally returned to the planet only when threatened with a helicopter assault. We observe the grand act from several points of view, notably that of his girlfriend, Annie Allix, who was left complaining on the ground so as not to provide additional distraction. To rip her words out of the original would be like putting Sweet-N-Low in the Chateau Latour, so here they are as she speaks them: "C'était tellement, tellement beau. C'était comme il marchait sur un nuage." For Phillipe Petit, the clouds were his sidewalk.