Man on Wire

The edge of my seat was the last place I expected to be. Some movies can produce vertigo by tricking the eyes. For instance, a special Imax process called Omnivision (literally a one-of-a-kind screen that stretches both in front of your eyes and over your head, located in Las Vegas) where your entire peripheral vision is engaged.
The Omnivision film unsprocketed with a Hawaiian theme and the first image hurled you into the azure Pacific Ocean at rocket speeds. The first reaction is to roll up into a ball and duck under your seat.
But this was a documentary on the small screen no less. Yet the effect of watching the Man on Wire trailer on YouTube can leave you dizzy. In the theater the very act of watching high wire hi-jinx being performed with no fear of death coupled with shots establishing the depth of the fall will produce armrest-hugging fear in even the most fleetfooted viewer.
Man on Wire documents what has to be the ultimate performance art crime of all time. Artist and acrobat Philippe Petit schemed and planned and surreptitiously assembled an international crew, snuck into both towers of the World Trade Center at the appropriate time, strung cable throughout the night and at daybreak walked across the span about eight times over a period of forty minutes. All this went down on August 7, 1974 although Petit had planned the walk for several years. Petit flew to New York a few times during his planning and as he tells the story in director James Marsh’s Man on Wire he was planning it like a noir crime caper.
Marsh unfolds the events like a mystery. Every 20-minutes or so there’s a new character introduced or a new development in Petit’s strategy. To string the wire an initial guideline is shot tower to tower via bow and arrow. How Petit finds the arrow in the dark, and how Marsh recreates this particular recollection, clearly demonstrates how weird the whole expedition had become.
When the police finally show up, Petit stops just out of reach of the cop and walks back out into the middle of the wire. This is where you engage the theater chair drink holder located near your right knee as a foothold.
We see the participants, as they were through photos and some filmed footage, and in the present day much wiser and over 30-years older. Colorful 1970s industrial shots of the Twin Towers puts their grandeur in perspective even showing the progress of construction. On one trip Petit got to the roof and is seen in photos joking with a crew up there.
After taking precise measurements Petit recreated the set up in a field back in France, and practiced the 200-foot walk, even if it was five feet off the ground. When the climatic moment comes we have a combination of re-creation, actual photos and briefly a moment of film shot from a news helicopter spiraling above Petit, a man without trepidation.
The title comes from the police description of the crime in progress. The cop had written on the crime report “man on wire.” Part of the fascination rests in Petit’s mischievous manner, an almost uncanny resemblance to the antics of silent film stars like Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton, both who performed many of their own stunts. Man on Wire includes snippets of other equally death defying walks that Petit performed before being arrested at Notre Dame and the Sydney Harbor Bridge. Petit even contributed illustrations to the new Debra Winger book she was signing at the MFAH last month. Somebody put Petit in a movie with Jackie Chan immediately.
Man on Wire opens at the River Oaks Three this Friday.