Man on Wire

I saw Man on Wire for the Archive last Thursday. It'll play at the end of June during the Los Angeles Film Festival before opening theatrically and it's worth a look - but don't worry about coming in late. The documentary about French high-wire walker and street performer Phillipe Petit walks a winding, convoluted path in getting to the moment we spend the whole film waiting for: Seeing Petit step out on to the thin wound metal cable that he and a misfit team of accomplices strung between the two towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. If Petit himself ever took such a rambling route in his previous headline grabbing, daredevil high wire stunts -- walking between the two bell towers of Notre Dame or the stanchions of Sydney Harbor Bridge -- his career would have been a short one. Man on Wire's director James Marsh, however, weaves backwards and forwards through Petite's life and his long nurtured plan to pull off what he and his team called "le coup," firstly in the hopes of building suspense and secondly, perhaps, to hide the fact that he's padded the story out with a lot of superfluous details and story lines to achieve a feature-length of 90 min. While Marsh succeeds in generating considerable anticipation by giving the exuberant, expressive Petit ample time to expound in retrospect on his life's passions and obsessions, much of it is squandered on a seemingly endless and random ordering of facts and events, particularly in the telling of their actual execution of the WTC plan. Just when you think you've had enough, however, Petit steps out on the wire ...

Thankfully Marsh avoids deploying any talking head sociologists, cultural critics or urban theorists to explain to us what Petit's, by turns, fantastical and suicidal, act means as art, spectacle or psychological aberration. The images, both still and moving, of Petit making his way across the wire suspended over 1300 feet above Manhattan, defy description. The act itself stands almost beyond words. It is a simply spellbinding in its terrifying beauty, even from a distance of 30 plus years. Not even Petit's own explanation of his quixotic intentions will suffice. Indeed, watching the images of Petit making multiple returns, back and forth across the wire, toying with the nonplussed New York City cops who converged on the rooftop within minutes, I came back to not to Petit's words but to something one of his Parisian cohorts said reflecting on the first time he set sight on the Empire State Building after arriving in Manhattan to execute the plan. Before he even laid eyes on the WTC, the Empire State Building drove home the immense scale of Manhattan's looming skyline as something out of proportion to human experience, even if the building of it was not beyond human will. If anything, Petit's performance was a triumph of the human over the sprawling, towering environments we humans increasingly live in. In a single act, he brought the alienating incomprehensibility of the World Trade Center's scale back down to human size and reaffirmed our place in the places we build for ourselves. (Petit himself, however, is brought crashing back to earth at the film's when he reveals that he capped off his soaring spiritual feat with a carnal night of anonymous sex with an eager NY fan while his long-time girlfriend waited back at the hotel.) That the outsized built environments of the modern megalopolis have now found their equivalent in the digital networks we swim in everyday makes Petit's act is as relevant now as it was then -- only one is left dismayed wondering what the digital equivalent of high wire walking would be and how long do we have to wait for some beautiful digital dreamer to pull it off.

Of course, one can't watch or think about Man on Wire without reflecting on 9-11 as well. Marsh avoids mention or reference to the event, by and large it seems, because it goes without saying: The terrorist attacks were Petit's human triumph rewritten as human tragedy. The thin line between creative and destructive act is made implicit in the film's reenactment of Petit and his crew's crew careful "plotting" and evasion of WTC security as they make their way to the roofs of both towers under cover of darkness. The urban artist and the terrorist are compelled to make their opposed statements on the same high-profile public site. They work on the same civic canvas. Beyond such comparisons, the destruction of the towers underscores the ephemerality of Petit's act, a performance that depended for its longevity in human memory, in part, on the then seemingly permanent monumentality of the WTC for its half life. Then again, one wonders if this doc would hold half the fascination it does if the towers were still standing. Now both Petit's performance and the Towers seem like the stuff of dreams.

UPDATE: Man on Wire also touched on one of my preeminent frustrations with docs about artists or performers. While celebrating Petit's vision and talents throughout, the film never once delves into the material facts of his existence, that is, how in the hell did this guy pay his bills? Yes, he's a street performer and the archival footage of his young life in Paris suggests his fairly modest living conditions at the time, but the source of his income, whether meager or not, is never touched upon at all. He obviously had the resources to fly back and forth to New York while planning his stunt, but where did they come from? Is busking in Paris really that lucrative? While a lot of fiction films about painters or poets or what have you tend to draw a lot of drama from the material struggles of their subjects as they endeavor to survive while producing their art, documentaries about artists past and present tend to leave out that side of the equation, as if guys like Petit exist entirely in an immaterial world of inspiration and creativity, unconnected and unaffected to the practical matters of paying the rent or buying food -- let alone numerous round trip tickets between New York and Paris. I always wonder what the reasoning is behind this kind of omission. Was Petit independently wealthy or something and did Marsh feel that detracted from his rebellious, free spirited pursuit of his dreams? Maybe it would and maybe it wouldn't, but failing to acknowledge the fact that artists have to eat too, always raises my suspicions. It's the Marxist in me I guess.