Image: Flickr
It might be jumping the gun a wee bit to lump this 2008 film into a list with all time classics, but something about James Marsh’s strangely touching and exhilarating documentary stuck with me so strongly over the last four years, that I feel like it deserves to be added to the cannon. Sure, it might not a film that redefined the movie landscape, but Marsh’s story unfolds so unexpectedly and told so creatively with such a remarkable climax, that it is a genuinely wondrous cinematic experience capable of hypnotizing viewers. If being lost and moved in the dark by dramatic imagery isn’t what movies are all about, then I guess I don’t understand movies (which, given my profession, hopefully isn’t the case).
At the center of the film is Philippe Petit, a joyous elfin creature who is equal parts artist and conman. Petit discovered his dream very early in life. He saw a drawing of the then proposed Twin Towers in New York and drew a line in between them. He instantly saw the buildings as the sight for the greatest tightrope act the world had ever seen. It didn’t matter that he lived in France and hadn’t actually walked a tightrope at the time, he had years of construction to prepare. And so he did, building a tightrope in his backyard and practicing endlessly. He enlisted friends to join the cause and staged practice public tightrope walks, one at Paris’ Notre-Dame and another on the Harbor Bridge in Sydney. By then he had a crew of artists, potheads, and lovers that only the 60s and 70s could have created. They went on to plan and execute the World Trade Center tightrope walk like a heist. They succeeded and ultimately parted ways the moment the adventure was over, but the photographs of Petit’s walk are a legacy to last several lifetimes.
It’s the kind of a goofy true life tale custom made for documentaries and easily could have been a rather forgettable fluff piece. Thankfully, fluff is not in director James Marsh’s repertoire. The BBC veteran was at the time of production best known for Wisconsin Death Trip, a strange semi-documentary (for lack of any other possible genre classification) in which he beautifully recreated some bizarre and disturbing true stories that occurred over a single year in Wisconsin. The haunting visual style he developed there carries over to Man On Wire with very different results. There’s nothing disturbing about this story, but Marsh’s eye for evocative monochrome images work perfectly in his recreations of the preparation and wire walk. He shoots the scenes like a vintage stylized European heist movie like Rififi and the suspense generated is visceral. Interviews with Petit and his collaborators tell the story, cut together with staged material, vintage footage, and photographs that blend together so well that it’s at times only possible to tell which scenes were freshly shot based on the quality of the photography. Common documentary concerns about never blurring the line between reality and fiction go out the window with this film. It isn’t a movie about compiling every available piece of archival material to create the most accurate representation of the facts. Marsh’s interest is only in telling the story in the most compelling way possible at any given moment, with fiction and documentary techniques combining into a single immersive experience.
It all of course builds up to Petit’s grand skyscraper balancing act and when that arrives, Marsh ditches the fictional elements entirely for vintage photographs. Given how kinetic the movie has up until that point, the stills grind everything to a halt and deliberately so. After all the carefully crafted build up, the walk is the inevitable climax and it delivers. I’ll never forget the audible awe in the audience when I saw this sequence play in a theater. The images are truly astounding, a tiny figure seemingly floating in the air on a miniscule wire. It doesn’t hurt the Petit was a showman, laying down, sitting, doing tricks, and remaining suspended 100 stories off the ground for 45 minutes. The sequence is one of the most inexplicably moving in recent film history.
What was the purpose of the stunt? Marsh wisely never dares to ask and perhaps he didn’t really care. Call it a work of art or call it an impossible dream. Either way, it’s extraordinary and the film treats it as an almost religious experience. Marsh’s interview techniques allow his subjects’ eccentricity and flaws to spill out honestly. They are all very normal people and hardly heroes, yet they accomplished something truly extraordinary. Perhaps that’s what the film is ultimately about, a loveletter to dreamers and the magical things they can create with fertile imaginations.
Man On Wire itself almost feels like a similar achievement, a singular vision that’s stunning, beautiful, funny, and moving in a way that isn’t quite like any other film. There’s something both innocently childlike and inexplicably profound in the project. Many of the great movies achieve that status precisely because they don’t strive for it. They are just unique stories that filmmakers felt compelled to tell in a specific way. Man On Wire is one of these movies. The brief passage of time since its release has been kind to the film and I’m certain that will continue. It’s a timeless, joyous cinematic experience and should remain that way as long as there are eyeballs that have yet to see it.
Man On Wire will screen at The Camera Bar on April 28 at 7 p.m.
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Phil Brown writes about classic films for Toronto Standard‘s Essential Cinema column.
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