Man on Wire
Directed by James Marsh
The summer of 1974 was not a happy one in the United States, and nowhere did matters seem more grim than in New York City. Only a year away from a catastrophic insolvency, the city was a mess, with its pockmarked streets, its buildings and bridges beginning to look as though they might crumble, graffiti slathered over subway trains and platforms offering millions of riders the unwelcome sense that they were trapped inside a heavy-metal album cover. Central Park had become a grassless mud pit. The crime spike that had begun a decade earlier continued to spiral upward; everyone, it seemed, had been mugged at least once.
And then, one morning in August, something inexplicably wonderful happened. A man appeared on a high wire between the twin towers of the recently completed World Trade Center. He walked between them for 45 minutes, nearly 1,400 feet above the ground, before being taken into police custody and then, just as quickly, released.
So vivid has the incident remained in my memory (I was 13 at the time) that I would have sworn under oath I had seen live footage that day of Philippe Petit’s tightrope act cutting into the morning’s Gilligan’s Island reruns. In point of fact, there was no footage, and there are only a few photographs of the event. Perhaps my false memory is so vivid because every other piece of news in New York and elsewhere around that time was so unrelievedly sour–Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace the next day–that the contrast afforded by Petit’s daring, clever, joyful, crazy, and exhilarating stunt has kept it fresh.
As Petit recounts in a compelling but slightly ponderous documentary called Man on Wire, all anybody wanted to ask him when he came down was “Why?”
It turns out there was no “why.” Petit was a tightrope walker and he wanted to create the world’s longest and most dangerous tightrope and walk across it. Doing so wasn’t just a matter of mastering the old-time equilibrium trick performed in circuses from time immemorial; Petit had that down. His goal required him to become an industrial engineer. What kind of wire should he use? How, exactly, could one sling a wire from the roof of one building to the other? To which structure on the respective roofs of the North and South Towers should each end be attached? How could the wire be stabilized?
Once all those questions were answered, there was the small matter of getting into the Twin Towers, hauling equipment weighing nearly one ton up to the roof, and fixing the wire in the dead of night–all the while eluding security guards and cops and the like. Petit’s team of helpers included two friends from Paris, two stoner Jewish hippies from Manhattan he met at a party, a guy with a handlebar mustache who worked in the building for the state insurance commissioner, and an Australian he met during a trip to Sydney a few years earlier when he strung a line across its Harbour Bridge.
Much of the movie is taken up with the team’s heist-like hijinks the night before the wire walk, complete with fictionalized recreations of Petit and Company hiding under tarpaulins for hours on parallel floors in the parallel buildings. This is probably the only tack director James Marsh could have taken, since there is no footage of Petit’s feat, and since the destruction of the Towers makes revisiting the scene of the crime impossible. But it does throw Man on Wire off balance, because the troubles they had were relatively petty compared to the dazzling originality and creativity of the high-wire act itself.
It is probably the best-reviewed movie this year, but I don’t think it’s being praised because of its own excellence; it’s just that the event itself was so extraordinary that the minimally competent recounting of it here has proved to be enough to cause critics and audiences to swoon.
Marsh gives us a little bit of the flavor of what it was like for New Yorkers that day and the days that followed, with some news footage of one of the arresting cops talking to reporters in a tone of dazed disbelief about how he realized, standing there on the roof of the North Tower, that he was witness to an act no one had ever attempted before or would ever attempt again. But Marsh doesn’t go very far with it. And that’s a pity, because what Philippe Petit did on that August day in 1974 was offer a depressed city a moment of dazzled wonderment so powerful that, 34 years later, I still can’t help but think that I, too, was a witness to it, even though I know I wasn’t.
John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
