The best of Zemeckis’s recent films—namely, Cast Away and Flight—had something to say beyond meeting the cinematic challenge at its core, while the others felt like exercises in pushing technological boundaries. The Walk falls somewhere in the middle. Petit’s 45-minute walk between the Twin Towers is what the entire film builds toward and, frankly, what audiences want to see, but Zemeckis and co-screenwriter Christopher Browne (working from Petit’s memoir To Reach the Clouds) have to do something in the meantime, so they provide a rather conventional biographical sketch of Petit and his early obsession with death-defying performance. We see him as a child and then as a young adult (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) intent on making a living, not as a circus stunt performer, but as a true artist whose aerial hijinks transcend typical human existence and enter the sublime. He is coached by old master Papa Rudy (Ben Kingsley, natch) and he finds romance with Annie Allix (Charlotte Le Bon), a fellow street performer who is at first annoyed, but later charmed and then distraught by his single-mindedness.

Petit alights on the idea of putting a wire between the towers of the World Trade Center as the ultimate expression of his artistry, although the idea—which he constantly refers to as his “coup”—is not just insanely dangerous, but also seemingly impossible to pull off. The logistics of the coup necessitate sneaking hundreds of pounds of cable and other heavy equipment into the buildings while they are still under construction (in mid-1974 both towers were occupied on the lower floors, but the upper portions were still being finished out) and then assembling a complex high wire system that can sustain heavy winds and remain stable. Petit conspires with several friends from France, Albert (Ben Schwartz) and Dale (James Badge), the latter of whom is, unfortunately, afraid of heights. Once they arrive in the U.S., he finds several American co-conspirators to work with him, most importantly Barry Greenhouse (Steve Valentine), a mustachioed insurance executive who works in the North Tower and therefore can function as an “inside man.”

Once The Walk moves away from Petit’s backstory in France and focuses on the intricacies of pulling off this ambitious project, it takes on the aura of a heist movie, except that they aren’t trying to take anything out of the buildings, but rather bring things in. This involves weeks of planning and surveillance followed by a complex overnight operation in which they sneak in all of the equipment and then spend hours setting it up while avoiding security guards. The sheer enormity of the undertaking would seem to doom it from the start, but Petit’s relentlessness and his friends’ willingness to go along with his ideas makes the impossible possible. Thus, the mere fact that Petit is able to step onto the wire nearly 1,400 feet above the streets of Manhattan is a massive accomplishment in and of itself. At that point, the film fully hits its stride, using the depth and enormity of the screen to make us feel as much as possible the thrill of Petit’s accomplishment, which he constantly intensifies by adding new tricks, starting with his decision to turn around and walk the wire again even after he has successfully traversed it. Once the cops arrive and are standing at either end, he simply stays on the wire, turning around at each tower just inches from their grasp, and at one point lying down on the wire.

The visceral thrill of vicariously experiencing Petit’s death-defying feat is undeniable, but as with so many of Zemeckis’s films, he pushes the envelope farther than it needs to go and makes some highly questionable decisions that undermine what is best in the film. Obviously there are a great number of visual effects at work here, and for the most part the computer-generated environment around Gordon-Levitt is fully convincing, allowing us to forget for long stretches that we are watching an actor safely traversing pixels. But then Zemeckis wants to go for broke, as in a sequence where a bird flies down into Petit’s face while he is lying on the wire. The bird is so obviously cartoonish and unconvincing in close-up that it pulls us out of an otherwise sublime moment of experience, reminding us again that it is all a digital construction.

Much worse, though, was Zemeckis and Browne’s decision to frame the film with Petit’s narration, which more often than not tells us more than we need to know and at times even duplicates what we are seeing on screen in a way that is redundant and annoying. They may have taken too much of a cue from Man on Wire, James Marsh’s excellent 2008 documentary in which Petit himself regales us with his version of the experience. Trying to one-up the presence of the man himself, Zemeckis makes the incalculably misguided decision to cut away frequently to shots of Gordon-Levitt in the torch of the Statue of Liberty narrating the story. The awkwardness of this set-up and the surprisingly fake-looking sun-drenched background renders these scenes laughable and distracting. It’s hard to know why Zemeckis felt like this was a good idea, except that it allows the film to end with an expectedly poignant reflection on the absence of the once derided Twin Towers that have, in the years since 9/11, become symbols of both loss and resilience.

Copyright ©2015 James Kendrick

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