JGL’s Breathtaking High Wire Walk Between The WTC Towers In THE WALK

Now playing at an IMAX theater near you:

THE WALK (Dir. Robert Zemeckis, 2015)

While watching James Marsh’s excellent Oscar-winning documentary MAN ON WIRE back in 2008, I thought many times that the story of Frenchman Philippe Petit’s high-wire walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in 1974 could really make for a great dramatized movie.

Obviously I wasn’t alone in that thinking because now we’ve got Robert Zemeckis’ supersized recreation of the event, releasing today only in IMAX theaters (it will enter wide release on October 9), starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Petit, and featuring some of the most exquisite and breathtaking visual effects ever rendered on the big screen.

It starts with an extreme, ginormous close-up of Gordon-Levitt telling us his story from the top of the Statue of Liberty with an immaculate view of the Manhattan skyline of the ‘70s behind him. Gordon-Levitt’s French accent may be just barely passable, but his boundless energy and charm make him a great Petit (he was also trained to walk on wire by Petit himself, so there's that). 

And check out JGL's mad miming and acrobatic skills in the early Paris scenes, in which Zemeckis mimics jaunty new wave French films in bits in black and white, and shots in the grainy color textures of that era.

Petit’s life is one of obsessions. First, he’s obsessed with learning how to tightrope walk, under the tutelage of a circus ringleader/father figure named Papa Rudy (Sir Ben Kingsley doing his Yoda thing); then he’s obsessed with finding the perfect place to perform his wire-walking act (the towers of Notre Dame cathedral is one early effort), and finally he’s obsessed with pulling off what he calls “the artistic coup of the 20th century.”

That is, of course, to illegally infiltrate the World Trade Center, which was still under construction, string a 450-pound steel cable between the towers, and conduct a high-wire walk for the whole world.

To pull it off, Petit recruits a rag tag crew of accomplices for the coup. First, there’s the lovely Annie (Charlotte Le Bon), who he has a meet-cute with in the streets of Paris – she’s busking Leonard Cohen songs while he upstages and steals her audience with his shenigans on the same block. Then there’s Clément Sibony as a dapper photographer, César Domboy as a math teacher, who is afraid of heights; James Badge Dale as a savvy electronics salesman, Ben Schwartz (Jean-Ralphio from Parks and Recreation!) as a New York recruit, and Steve Valentine as Petit's inside man at the Trade Center as he has an office on the 82nd floor. 

The pacing really picks up as Petit’s meticulous plotting, 6 years in the making, gets put into action, helped along by longtime Zemeckis collaborator Alan Silvestri's score which takes its jazzy queue from such ‘70s crime capers as THE TAKING OF PELHAM 1,2,3 for the heist-like sequences.

The first half is fine, but as you’d expect it’s the second half involving the staging of the stunt itself that really - forgive me, but it’s right there – reaches incredible heights.

Every shot pops, with not a single moment that’s unconvincing, of Petit’s walk across the air 110 stories above street level, as crowds gather to watch, and policemen pop up on both towers waiting to arrest the performing perpetrator.

Look for cinematographer Dariusz Wolski, and visual effects supervisor Kevin Baillie to get many accolades this upcoming awards season – what these guys did here, helped by an army of digital technicians, of course, is beyond stellar. It's also one of the few 3D films in which the format feels the most necessary.

Now, I have a bit of a fear of heights, so I strongly felt the sensation of being on the edge of my seat – I don’t care how much of a cliché that is – throughout the sky high scenes that form the climax. At the same time, I felt the regret that I had never been to the top of the towers when I had the chance (in 1995, I was visiting my brother in New York and came close to going up, but the lines were too long for us. Sigh).

Like many of Zemeckis’s films, THE WALK is several movies at once: it’s a heist thriller, it’s a high-scaling adventure, it’s a comedy, and it’s a love story – though, one that’s about being in love with a dream. All of these genres collide together into a pure piece of pop entertainment that’s one of the director’s and the year’s best films.

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Taking On The RED RIDING Trilogy

This set of 3 feature length films based on David Pearce's semi-true crime novel series "Red Riding Quartet" is currently playing in limited release theatrically and is available on IFC Films On Demand.

RED RIDING: 1974 (Dir. Juliam Jarrold, 2009)


 

This first "episode" starts off with an air of a British ZODIAC, but a darker prism of power is revealed beyond the smoky newsrooms and seedy cop dives as the film reaches its brutally unsettling conclusion.

In "The Year Of Our Lord" 1974, wet-behind-the-ears yet arrogant Yorkshire journalist Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield) sums up the scene as he arrives at a press conference: 

"A little girl goes missing. The pack salivates. If it bleeds, it leads, right?" When the girl in question is found murdered Dunford makes the connection to similar crimes involving children committed in the same area in the years before. Like a classic film noir caper, there are many competing plot-lines for our intrepid reporter.


A fellow scribe (Anthony Flanagan) has files full of proof of police corruption, the land where the girls were found is owned by a menacing local mogul (Sean Bean) who has plans to build a major shopping complex there if he can get rid of squatting gypsies, and, the icing on the cake, Dunford has just begun an affair with the mother of the most recent missing girl (Rebecca Hall).


The grim wasteland of the English countryside in the mid 70's is the perfect backdrop for this study - not of serial killings, but of the twisted knots in the fabric of society that naive newbies like Garfield's Dunford get tangled in with little hope of struggling free.


Despite getting roughed up by thug cops on the take, Dunford routinely mocks his elders, but the suave cunning Bean posits that he and the rookie reporter are a lot alike: "We like to fuck and make a buck and we're not choosy how."

Although it doesn't quite earn its TAXI DRIVER-ish climax, RED RIDING: 1974 is a compelling piece of cinema with a minimum of artsy touches and depth to its grit. Despite director Jarrold employing few gratuitous period flourishes it could be mistaken for an actual 70's era thriller - one that's as concerned with the darkness itself as much as what lurks in it.

RED RIDING: 1980 (Dir. James Marsh, 2009) MAN ON WIRE Documentary film maker Marsh helms this second installment which centers on Paddy Considine as Investigator Peter Hunter being brought in on the case of the Yorkshire Ripper in, again, as the title ominously tells us "The Year of Our Lord" 1980.

Hunter believes that one of the murders, the girl from the first film, wasn't committed by the Ripper. It muddies the waters that one of his team (Maxine Peak) is a former colleague with whom he once had an affair. It also impedes the investigation that seemingly every policeman on the force opposes Hunter for reasons that become shockingly clear in the second half.

RED RIDING 1980 takes its time getting going but when it does it becomes a Hell of a potboiler and, perhaps, the strongest of the trilogy. Considine anchors the film admirably, convincingly descending from confident determination to a mode of desperate obsession. The film itself is sturdier than its predecessor especially as its pace tightens with Marsh displaying a palpable mastery of tension.

RED RIDING: 1983 (Dir. Anand Tucker, 2009)



"This is the North - where we do what we want!"

This phrase is repeated throughout these films as both a declaration and a warning to outsiders, but its full impact is not really felt until this concluding chapter - or maybe that's just the power of repetition.

While the first one was seen through the eyes of a journalist and the second the eyes of a police detective, the third has 2 protagonists - a public solicitor named John Piggott (Mark Addy) and returning character Detective Superintendent Maurice Jobson (David Morrissey). Each is on the opposite end of the case making their way into the murky middle.

The loose ends of the first 2 films are tied up competently here but there's unnecessary usage of stylistic abstraction present. The sex scenes in the series before had a perfunctory feel to them but here they're completely stitched in with no passion present.

Only the spare moments of violence have visceral energy and those don't come off as effectively as in the previous chapters. Though Morrissey effectively personifies repressed stodginess, the 2 leads aren't strong enough to guide us through the subdued action which drags down the pace.

It's certainly possible that these 3 films could've been much better if tightened into a single epic movie, but maybe we'll see how that well that works out if Ridley Scott takes on an Americanized remake (yes, I know he's British).

All 3 RED RIDING films are worthwhile but the first 2 are the essential ones - the third provides resolution. Oddly, only the first one has English subtitles. Since this helps a lot with the heavy accents, it's a pity that the others don't follow suit.

Yet even with the matter of some impenetrable dialogue and though the films' total running time of over 5 hours makes taking in the whole trilogy into a bit of a slog - it's a mostly satisfying slog.

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