Joseph Gordon-Levitt is Phillipe Petit, the young man from France who walked across a wire between the twin towers of the World Trade Center when construction was almost finished in the early 1970s. Not only did he walk across, he walked across the yawning chasm four times. Well, 3.8 times. And he survived to become a celebrity for a period and earn a place in the book of world records.
It's far from a stark drama. It's more of a caper movie along the lines of "Never on Sunday", a salubrious blend of comedy, irony, and suspense, a realization of one man's fantasy. Petit relates his tale directly into the camera from the torch atop the Statue of Liberty.
He makes no jokes but he's amusing because he demonstrates his exasperation when something goes awry and he does it the way a child might do it. Quelle nuisance! What eece that veesitor doing op here at theece hour of the morning! The police officers who occupy the roofs of both towers while Petit is in the middle are equally amusing: "We got a couple of Frogs up here."
I can understand how Petit could walk the wire between the two towers. He's good at it. It's much harder to understand how he managed to organize and pull off this stunt ("the coup") and how he managed to recruit his handful of assistants and supporters ("accomplices"). They're a varied lot, these accomplices. Half are French and half are American. Petit meets one of them for the first time in Paris, Jeff, an aspiring photographer and artist, who doesn't believe in the sanctity of art or the privileged position of the artist. "Hah, so you're an anarchist!" "Every artist is an anarchist to some extent." (That's the kind of conversational exchange you're far more likely to hear in Paris than in Dubuque.)
I've been using the word "suspense" a little freely. "Tension" might be more apt. After all, we already know Petit pulled it off and lived to tell the tale. The guy is admirable, even though his obsession made him difficult to work with. And I suppose many artists want to do some Big Thing, some memorable (even if ephemeral) work of art.
Gutson Borglum must have been flooded with self satisfaction when he finished the faces on Mount Rushmore. In the mid-1970s Christo built a fabric wall 25 miles long through Sonoma and Marin Counties in the San Francisco Bay area. About the same time someone tried to mount a huge rubber balloon of King Kong on top of the Empire State building but unlike Phillipe Petit, King Kong fell. Petit had the better central pattern generator.
It's far from a stark drama. It's more of a caper movie along the lines of "Never on Sunday", a salubrious blend of comedy, irony, and suspense, a realization of one man's fantasy. Petit relates his tale directly into the camera from the torch atop the Statue of Liberty.
He makes no jokes but he's amusing because he demonstrates his exasperation when something goes awry and he does it the way a child might do it. Quelle nuisance! What eece that veesitor doing op here at theece hour of the morning! The police officers who occupy the roofs of both towers while Petit is in the middle are equally amusing: "We got a couple of Frogs up here."
I can understand how Petit could walk the wire between the two towers. He's good at it. It's much harder to understand how he managed to organize and pull off this stunt ("the coup") and how he managed to recruit his handful of assistants and supporters ("accomplices"). They're a varied lot, these accomplices. Half are French and half are American. Petit meets one of them for the first time in Paris, Jeff, an aspiring photographer and artist, who doesn't believe in the sanctity of art or the privileged position of the artist. "Hah, so you're an anarchist!" "Every artist is an anarchist to some extent." (That's the kind of conversational exchange you're far more likely to hear in Paris than in Dubuque.)
I've been using the word "suspense" a little freely. "Tension" might be more apt. After all, we already know Petit pulled it off and lived to tell the tale. The guy is admirable, even though his obsession made him difficult to work with. And I suppose many artists want to do some Big Thing, some memorable (even if ephemeral) work of art.
Gutson Borglum must have been flooded with self satisfaction when he finished the faces on Mount Rushmore. In the mid-1970s Christo built a fabric wall 25 miles long through Sonoma and Marin Counties in the San Francisco Bay area. About the same time someone tried to mount a huge rubber balloon of King Kong on top of the Empire State building but unlike Phillipe Petit, King Kong fell. Petit had the better central pattern generator.