Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ben Kingsley, Charlotte Le Bon, James Badge Dale, César Domboy, Ben Schwartz, Steve Valentine, Clément Sibony
Director: Robert Zemeckis
Rating: 3.5 stars
The Walk tells the true life story of Philippe Petit (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). An acrobat who aspires to make daring and difficult stunts, Petit is regarded as a vandal and a nuisance in France. He aims to prove himself to the world — that he is an artist — by performing a stunt of gigantic proportions. In the 1970s, he comes across information of two mammoth skyscrapers built in New York City, the tallest in the world: the twin towers of the World Trade Centre. Petit conceives of a coup — he will infiltrate the towers, go to the top floor and hurl a tightrope wire between the towers and walk across it for the entire world to see.
The story of Philippe Petit was previously related in the 2008 Oscar winning documentary Man on Wire. It narrated the events with photographs, interviews and recreations. Robert Zemeckis, in this stirring movie, puts us into the thick of the action and so successful is his realisation and digital recreation that even after seeing the documentary and knowing all I do about the events, even I felt there were moments where Petit wouldn’t survive. Zemeckis (Forrest Gump, Cast Away) is no stranger to using digital effects or portraying stories of unlikely heroes and dreamers. The appropriately named Petit is a nobody at the start. A side-show performer frequently harassed and always performing for free, for him, being an acrobat is a way of life and if that is illegal then that’s the law’s problem not his. As he says at one point, “Yes I am arrogant, I have to be.”
It’s sad that from now on, movies like The Walk are the only ways we will ever be able to see the former World Trade Centre twin towers. Most of us can never truly imagine how tall and awesome these buildings were once upon a time, which means that we can’t really understand how crazy Philippe Petit was to even attempt his wire walk between the towers. Zemeckis puts it across when Petit and his girlfriend visit New York and he approaches the base of the tower, the steel-glass reflective bottom. Another character is afraid of heights and he has trouble over the height of the smaller plaza. Later, the same boy who is afraid of heights goes to the very top. The nature of Petit’s stunt is such that you gain a sense of what the twin towers were built for — a place for offices, a place for people to work, who were the people, built it and who ran maintenance. In a way, The Walk is a movie about the twin towers as much as it is about Petit, as the film’s moving final image clarifies.
Zemeckis is no-nonsense, so the first half of the film moves fast, setting the stage, backstory, relations between the characters, how they learn about the kind of ropes and cables they will need, how they will establish the rope across the towers. The second half is about the lengthy and detailed “coup”. Not a single aspect is neglected in the build-up, the hiccups, the hasty last improvisations, the weird coincidences that lead to this event. The finale of course is hair-raising.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt has found some fame as a character actor in Inception and The Dark Knight Rises. Here he’s the lead and he is terrific. Intense and funny, charismatic and arrogant, it’s a role with a lot of shades to it. His French accent is suburb and his physical feats are quite good. James Badge Dale, an up and coming character plays JP, a gregarious American store-manager who proves to be far from the ugly American his French customers assume. Ben Kingsley chips in a glorified cameo, playing in effect the same character from Martin Scorsese’s Hugo — an old time French artist who trains and inspires the plucky, eager, young apprentice.
The Walk is in some sense an old-fashioned adventure movie. It can be seen by the whole family, it is narrated by the hero from the Statue of Liberty (appropriate because that was a gift by France to America) and it switches between ‘60s France and early ‘70s America. It’s a movie with some amount of melancholy but mostly it’s about human endeavour and friendships. It’s about giving thanks.
The writer is programmer, Lightcube Film Society
