Friday, March 29, 2024

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Review // The Walk

First Published:

[projekktor id=’21213′]

Robert Zemeckis’ true story about the man who walked a tightrope between the twin towers asks the question “can a single scene save a movie?” It also answers it. “Yes, as long as you see it in IMAX 3D.”

The Walk stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Philippe Petit, juggler, clown, tightrope walker, and incessant narrator. Kicked out of his home as a teenager for his circus shenanigans, Philippe is getting by as a street performer (and telling us all about it) when he encroaches on the turf of the beautiful Annie (Charlotte LeBon), a street performer herself, though not exactly Joni Mitchell on the guitar. Over wine Philippe shares with her his dream of walking a tightrope between the towers of New York City’s World Trade Center. Before long the pair are assembling a group of co-conspirators and flying to New York to plan Philippe’s “coup”.

Despite the fact that he seems like the sort of guy who would corner your girlfriend at a party and not let up, Gordon-Levitt’s charismatic Petit carries us through the first half of the film. With a goofy French accent and twinking blue contacts, he’s like a magician doing an hour long set up for the card trick we came to see. Zemeckis employs a playful tone and a big bag of 3D tricks to keep our attention (a scene of Petit walking a tightrope in a circus tent is a dizzying sign of things to come), but when the film finally gets to the roof of the South Tower and we take our first woozy glimpse over the edge, we do so with a gasp of relief. This is what we came to see.

I found myself sitting up straighter as I watched Gordon-Levitt sway on a steel beam, jutting 400 metres above the ground. The physical sensation Zemeckis’ camera creates is as close as you’ll get to returning to the earliest days of film when audiences leapt out of the way of a train speeding towards them onscreen. Petit’s walk is a jarring, unsteady, and (after you’ve gotten used to it) thrilling experience, and it instantly washes away any of the negative feelings from the first half (and for some people also washes away those $8 Maltesers).

That’s not to say it’s a great film. Zemeckis has created a strange beast. It’s a biographical portrait of an obsessed man. It’s a love letter to the twin towers. It’s an IMAX 3D spectacle. It’s also devoid of any real conflict, clunkily written, and features only one character we learn anything about, and even then we only really know that he likes walking on tightropes. Nevertheless, like Gordon-Levitt’s self-obsessed narrator, it’s strangely endearing.

If you want to learn Philippe’s story I recommend you watch James Marsh’s Academy Award winning documentary Man on Wire (2008), it’s a far more in-depth portrait of the man and the event. But if you’re more in the market for the visceral sensation of standing on a wire almost half a kilometre above the streets of New York, The Walk delivers in spades. Zemeckis’s film stands beside Mad Max: Fury Road as the only movie this year that must be seen in 3D. For all the shrug-worthy films converted after the fact so that distributors can jack the tickets prices, there is the occasional film that justifies the entire medium. The Walk is that film. 

Reviewed by Evan Arppe.

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