By Preston Wilder
It’s a good week for feeling nauseous at the cinema – but all the shots of machete-chopped limbs and cooked human meat in The Green Inferno pale beside the sight of one skinny figure, Joseph Gordon-Levitt as French wire-walker Philippe Petit, placing a soft-shoed foot on a wire slung between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. A two-inch-wide stripe of relative safety surrounded on all sides by the void, 110 floors of nothing stretching down to the ground below, a sight to make your palms sweat and your stomach knot. Admittedly, I have a fear of heights – but really, who wouldn’t?
It’s strange, in a way, because the void is an abstraction. There’s no actual threat here. Nothing will go wrong. We know this because the film is a true story – Petit is a real person who performed this feat on August 6, 1974 – but director Robert Zemeckis underlines it by having his hero narrate the whole thing in flashback, looking chipper and very much alive. Unlike the wire itself, there’s no tension in The Walk. The void is being used symbolically, milked for conceptual impact – and it works. Just the idea of someone flirting with death so brazenly is enough to induce palpitations.
There’s another symbolic notion, the idea of Petit’s ‘walk’ as an artwork and Petit himself as an artist. “I’m an artist!” he announces early on, and promptly gets thrown out on his “little artistic ass” – but it’s true, he has a point. His stunt can only be understood as Art (there’s no reason to do it; he’s not breaking a record, or raising money for charity, or any of the usual bourgeois justifications; in fact, the stunt is totally illegal), and walking the wire is like Art in another way as well. Every writer, or other kind of artist, knows that sense of walking a delicate line between endless nothingness in order to create. The right word or brush-stroke is like the wire; touch it – and keep touching it – and you’ve found a way through the void. Miss it, and you tumble to earth.
Zemeckis, the man behind Back to the Future and Forrest Gump, is unlikely to call himself an artist (at least out loud): he’s an unpretentious director, and perhaps a rather cold director. Like Petit, he specialises in stunts, shooting entire films on a desert island (Cast Away) or in revolutionary motion-capture animation, which he did for most of the 00s starting with The Polar Express. Like Petit, he’s a showman whose films combine meticulous organisation with a sense of “le spectacle” – and he wisely eschews realism in The Walk, if only because this story has already been told realistically in the acclaimed (if overrated) documentary Man on Wire, which won an Oscar some years ago.
The Walk is deliberately fanciful, artificial, hokey, using Hollywood clichés with abandon. Petit and his cohorts are French but speak English among themselves, in order to practise for when they get to America (yeah, right). “August 6th!” announces our hero on a rainy night, having decided on the date for his stunt – and his announcement is immediately punctuated by a clap of thunder. On the night of the 5th, with Philippe on the roof of the WTC, everything goes wrong. A guard unexpectedly arrives on patrol, edging close to where the wire has been slung – oh no! he’s going to see it! – but gets called away at the very last second. Philippe’s injured foot starts bleeding; he drops his costume, and is forced to walk the wire in a “ridiculous undershirt”; his friends freak out or desert him. But still, in best Spielbergian fashion, he Follows his Dream.
Petit never says the word ‘death’, living in self-conscious denial; Zemeckis never says the words ‘who are these people?’, as if too much psychology would bring the film crashing down into the void. Gordon-Levitt is elfin and lithe as the lunatic Frenchman (the film has exactly the hint of lunacy that’s missing from Everest, another tale of because-it-was-there derring-do); Ben Kingsley hams shamelessly as his mentor, a circus acrobat with indeterminate Eastern European accent. The Walk is lighter-than-air, as if to reassure Americans for whom the Twin Towers remain a sombre symbol; it floats through its plot with a kind of prankish glee – then quietly floats out onto the wire, and the void opens up yet the film doesn’t panic. Zemeckis (helped by cutting-edge technology) shows every detail with the same unhurried ease as Petit walking the wire – even as our palms start to sweat, and our stomach knots. Is The Walk perfect? No. But it’s incredible.
DIRECTED BY Robert Zemeckis
STARRING Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Charlotte Le Bon, Ben Kingsley
US 2015 123 mins
