James Marsh's documentary Man on Wire may not be the best movie in the Tribeca Film Festival--it feels a little drawn-out at 94 minutes, and it includes "dramatic reconstructions" that, mixed in with home movies and news footage, create confusion about whether what we're seeing is real or staged--but it's easy to see why it belongs in the Tribeca Film Festival. As everyone knows, the festival was created in the wake of, and as a response to, the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and the movie is about one of the few moments in the WTC's history that can only be called likable: the day of August 7, 1974, when Philippe Petit, a self-taught wire walker and master of other carny skills, such as picking pockets, managed to hang a wire between the two towers and perform on it, some 1300 feet above the ground. Interviewed in the movie along with his various accomplices, Petit, who couldn't be more elfinly French if he were played by Dominique Pinon, says that he knew that he had to do it when he first learned of the WTC's construction, years before the buildings were finished; while he was working the kinks out of his plan, he warmed up by performing similar illegal wire walks above Notre Dame Cathedral and Australia's Sydney Harbour Bridge.
Marsh's film, which is an entertaining curio, builds up to the triumphant big moment by letting the principles lay out how the scheme came together. (For Petit, getting out on that wire was nothing compared to smuggling his equipment into the building and up onto a high floor so that the wire itself could be set in place.) It can't be said that the movie does much for the legend of the American can-do spirit; of the three Americans in in the plot, one of them panicked and bailed at a crucial moment and another was summarily dispensed by Petit for turning up at a planning session while stoned. (Asked about it now, the man says, "I smoked pot every day for thirty-five years. I don't know why I wouldn't have smoked it that day.") As for the third local member of the team, the "inside man" Barry Greenhouse, his mustache alone is cause to suspect that he's really a Martian who took a job working in an office on the 82nd floor of Tower Two just to make ends meet. For New York audiences, the real star of the movie will be the cop who turns up in news footage at the end to explain it all to the TV cameras in an accent that would bring tears to Clifford Odets's eyes and with the kind of phrasing that you only encounter when a New York cop decides to get all precise on your ass. Calling Petit "a wire dancer" because "you couldn't really call him a wire walker" based on what he saw him doing out there, the cop says that it was explained to Petit's partner in crime that if he didn't come inside, "we were gonna get a helicopter out there and pluck him" off the wire, whereupon the accomplice began to "shout at him in French," which made perfect sense when you think about it, "seeing as how he's from France."
