Wire Under Man

Pluto TV has been running a movie that I'd heard of and mostly knew what it was about, but that I had never seen: Man on Wire. So with it available, I eventually got around to watching it.

In August, 1974, Frenchman Philippe Petit famously walked on a tightrope wire between the two towers of the World Trade Center. Many years later Petit wrote a memoir, and British documentarian James Marsh obtained the rights to make a documentary about Petit's feat; Man on Wire was the result of this.

Now, we know that Petit was successful in walking across that wire between the two towers, so how do we get to a full-length documentary of the incident? Well, what Petit did was decidedly illegal, and for good reason. It only takes the first bombing of the World Trade Center with a car bomb in the parking garage to realize that letting people have full run of such a building might not be such a good idea. Petit knew that what he was doing was illegal, but how to get the wire between the two buildings to be able to do the walk in the first place? That is what quite a lot of Man on Wire is about, in part because there's not all that much footage of Petit actually doing the walk. Petit couldn't bring a video camera up to the roof of the World Trade Center to film what he was doing, after all.

Petit had been an avid tightrope walker along with performing other circus-type things like balancing acts and sleight of hand. Indeed, before he walked between the Twin Towers he had (illegally) set up a wire between the two towers of Notre Dame cathedral in his native France, and then walked between the two towers of the Sydney Harbor Bridge. So when the World Trade Center was under constuction, it was only natural that Petit would get the itch to try to put up a wire between the two towers and walk across it.

Getting the wire several hundred feet across is a logistical challenge, but even before that is getting the wire up to the roof in the first place. And it's not just the wire Petit would walk across; he needed a bunch of support wires to keep the main wire from moving too much up and down, along with the balancing pole. So he was going to need people on both of the towers to install that wire. (Cue the Simpsons joke where Homer gets to the restrooms at the top of one tower, only to find a sign saying "Out of order. Use other tower.") This would require several accomplices to do the dirty work, as well as an inside man who could get them in the building as well as get them ID that looked legitimate enough to get them in the building for long stretches carrying all that equipment.

Along the way, we learn that Philippe is probably a bit nuts in the same sense that jokes are made about field goal kickers in football being squirrely. That, and a bit audaciously conceited, which might make him hard to like for some reviewers, but qualities that if he didn't have he'd never have been able to make it across the wire.

Man on Wire pieces all of this together in part with home footage Petit had filmed practicing back in France; some recreations of the preparation (but obviously not the walk itself); and interviews with many of the accomplices as well as Petit himself. Those accomplices included his then girlfriend, but soon to become ex, in one of the ironic codas to the story. That, and the story is told in the form of a heist movie, which really befits what Petit and his accomplices had to do.

One thing the documentary doesn't do, at least not explicitly, is to mention September 11, 2001. Director Marsh said why ruin such a glorious story with the ugliness everyone knows happened. At the same time, however, it's impossible to watch Man on Wire without the poignancy of knowing what was going to happen to the two towers. It's much like watching the few films of people like Kay Kendall or Suzan Ball: they put up good performances, but audiences at the time wouldn't know that the two actresses were terminally ill with cancer and soon to die; viewers of today, at least avid movie buffs, do know it. There's also one shot in the movie looking up at the towers with a jet plane suspiciously low in the sky.

Man on Wire is a fine documentary, and definitely one that you should watch if you get the chance. The story would later be made into a dramatisation, The Walk. I haven't seen it, so I can't comment on it.