I came to this film having watched the documentary "Man On The Wire" where the real Philippe Petit recounts the inside story of his jaw-dropping high-wire walk between the Twin Towers of New York, just before their construction was completed, in the summer of 1974. That was fascinating in itself, but in just using archive photography, couldn't in the end really deliver the actual physical experience of the walk that early August morning and that is what Robert Zemeckis, a director who knows a thing or two about creating the cinematic fantastic does here.
The back up story of how Petit became a high-wire walker and planned his "coup" as he termed it, with his support team, I remembered from the earlier film and so I found myself impatiently hurrying these scenes along until the fateful moment when he sets out for his morning walk, suspended a mere quarter of a mile above the city. I must admit, it doesn't disappoint, the full scale of his vertiginous perambulation brought out with multiple viewpoint camera-work, taking the viewer up there with Petit as it happened.
As the New York police arrive up on the roof of both buildings to call a halt to proceedings, it's all the viewer can do to stop shouting at them on the screen not to detract him from his walk as one slip of concentration could prove disastrous, even more so when they send a helicopter up above him, without thought of what the down-draft might do to him. Then incredibly, as in reality, Petit walks back and forth between the buildings, lying down halfway across and taking bows, remarkable as it may seem. I was reminded of those hair-raisingly famous black and white pictures of the workmen sitting astride the steel plates with their lunch canteens during the construction of the Emoire State Building in the 30's.
Joseph-Gordon Levitt doesn't really have to do much (!) as Petit other than his enigmatic pieces to camera and accomplish the walks themselves but he convincingly succeeds in taking you into Petit's head, even down to speaking fluent French as the occasion demands. Ben Kingsley is effective as his mentor and teacher Papa Rudy, while the other major presences in the film are the Towers themselves and beyond them the city and people of New York itself.
Reference is respectfully made at the end, as it must do, to the horrific events of September 11, but the film succeeds in ensuring that at least one other part of the Towers history celebrates the courage of one man during its construction as opposed to the cowardice of the many who plotted its destruction.
The back up story of how Petit became a high-wire walker and planned his "coup" as he termed it, with his support team, I remembered from the earlier film and so I found myself impatiently hurrying these scenes along until the fateful moment when he sets out for his morning walk, suspended a mere quarter of a mile above the city. I must admit, it doesn't disappoint, the full scale of his vertiginous perambulation brought out with multiple viewpoint camera-work, taking the viewer up there with Petit as it happened.
As the New York police arrive up on the roof of both buildings to call a halt to proceedings, it's all the viewer can do to stop shouting at them on the screen not to detract him from his walk as one slip of concentration could prove disastrous, even more so when they send a helicopter up above him, without thought of what the down-draft might do to him. Then incredibly, as in reality, Petit walks back and forth between the buildings, lying down halfway across and taking bows, remarkable as it may seem. I was reminded of those hair-raisingly famous black and white pictures of the workmen sitting astride the steel plates with their lunch canteens during the construction of the Emoire State Building in the 30's.
Joseph-Gordon Levitt doesn't really have to do much (!) as Petit other than his enigmatic pieces to camera and accomplish the walks themselves but he convincingly succeeds in taking you into Petit's head, even down to speaking fluent French as the occasion demands. Ben Kingsley is effective as his mentor and teacher Papa Rudy, while the other major presences in the film are the Towers themselves and beyond them the city and people of New York itself.
Reference is respectfully made at the end, as it must do, to the horrific events of September 11, but the film succeeds in ensuring that at least one other part of the Towers history celebrates the courage of one man during its construction as opposed to the cowardice of the many who plotted its destruction.