Man on Wire Review

When I take time out of my life to sit down and watch a movie, I want to be rewarded in some way. I want to laugh to the point of tears or have the shit scared out of me. I want to feel inspired or I want to feel moved. I want to feel emotion in some way. Man on Wire is an incredibly interesting and gracefully short documentary about the acts of Phillipe Petit, a man whose life revolves around the inherently dangerous act of tight-rope-walking. While I enjoyed watching the film, I can't say that I would consider re-watching it any time soon, nor would I recommend it to that many people; it's a film that, for a multitude of reasons, did not live up to the potential that I feel the subject matter clearly had.

The movie revolves around Petit, a french man who's turned the novelty act of walking along a slack line into a lifestyle. The man lives to "walk on air," as the movie so romantically put it. We learn about Petit through a combination of home videos taken from various points in his life and interviews with both himself and his loved ones. By nature, Petit puts his life in danger every time he walks the wire; he can't seem to help himself. We learn early in the film that he considered it his "destiny" to walk across the Twin Towers.

Therein lies my initial problem with the movie: the egotism of Petit makes him an incredibly frustrating person to follow for even an hour. The entire movie is more of a testament to his greatness than a documentary about the act of walking across the World Trade Center. Petit's boldness definitely makes him an interesting character to root for, but the movie takes things a bit too far. The viewer is constantly subjected to spliced-in interviews of Petit's friends admiring him. After a while, I lost all connection with him; the amount that the movie builds him up makes him a difficult person to relate to or care for.

The amount of time that the film spends sucking Petit's penis should be spent covering the art of wire-walking, a fascinating act worth exploring. It doesn't spend nearly as much time as it should on the subject, as when it finally divulges from the Petit slobber-fest, it goes into gut-wrenchingly accurate detail about the process that led up to the World Trade Center act. The sequence is presented to look like a heist, and it consumes about half of the movie, which constantly jumps from discussing the Twin Towers to discussing Petit as a person. By about half an hour in, I had had enough. I didn't care anymore about how they got cables to the top of the world trade center, or about how some of the group members didn't like each other. I just wanted to see some wire-walkin'.

The final fifteen minutes of the movie represent a monumental relief, as the viewer is treated to actual footage of the crossing of the Towers. Thankfully, the entire sequence is incredibly entertaining. It consists of actual video footage of Petit gracefully walking across the wire some fifteen hundred feet in the air. It's exactly what I wanted; daring, adventurous and fun.

Naturally, the entire movie depends on this dramatic finale. I left in a good mood, but that mood waned as time went on. As entertaining as the finale was, it couldn't carry the enormous expectations thrust upon it by the rest of the movie. For a movie that's eighty percent buildup, twenty percent action, something monumental needed to have happened in that sequence, and as dramatic as it was, it didn't validate what had preceded it. If I had to assign it a letter grade, I'd probably give it a B-minus.