THE WALK (Robert Zemeckis). 123 minutes. Some subtitles. Opens Friday (October 2). Rating: NNNN
If you are even the slightest bit wobbly about heights, do not see The Walk in IMAX 3D. You’ll be paying $19 to stare at your feet for an hour.
That’s the length of time the movie spends atop (and around) the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, where French aerialist Philippe Petit made his remarkable high-wire crossing on the morning of August 7, 1974. And while that impressive feat was documented very effectively in James Marsh’s Oscar-winning documentary Man On Wire, Marsh didn’t have. Robert Zemeckis’s toolbox.
Zemeckis has the means (and the budget) to recreate Petit’s stunt – and the towers themselves – with vertiginous, almost photo-realistic precision. Your stomach will plunge and your palms will get clammy, and you will believe Joseph Gordon-Levitt is standing 110 stories above the concrete.
Without its astonishing visual effects, The Walk would be a stilted and occasionally insufferable motion picture. Zemeckis goes full Forrest Gump on the material: Gordon-Levitt affects a ridiculous Fronch accent (and distracting blue contact lenses) to play Petit as a twinkly-eyed dreamer, and the film has him narrate the story perched on the torch of the Statue of Liberty.
The first half-hour is unbearably twee – involving unicycles, mime and Ben Kingsley in one of his puffier performances – and the next movement isn’t much better, as Petit obsesses over the details of his “coup” while -ignoring his girlfriend (Charlotte Le Bon) and his accomplices.
But then – well, then there’s the ascent, and the rigging of the wire and the walk itself. And that’s when you remember that Zemeckis made all three Back To The Future movies and Who Framed Roger Rabbit and even Contact, and he knows how to build a goddamn set piece. I knew everything that was going to happen, and my heart was still in my throat.
The Walk will be compared to Titanic and Avatar, and it deserves those comparisons. It’s not really a narrative it’s an experience. And on that level it delivers the goods. We’ve never seen anything like it. Well, Philippe Petit has.
