走钢丝的人man on wire英文影评

It's impossible to turn on the TV or peruse the newspaper these days without coming across updates on suicide bombings in Iraq or headlines confirming or denying the effects of global warming. We've certainly dug ourselves into quite a great number of holes running this human race and the plethora of documentaries reminding us of it (I.O.U.S.A., Taxi to the Dark Side, An Inconvenient Truth among others) don't seem to be improving matters. But just when things seem hopeless, out of nowhere comes this illuminating spark that lights up our hearts with an infectious sense of celebration of the human spirit. In January 2008 that spark hit the Sundance Film Festival in the form of Man on Wire which captured both the Audience Award and Grand Jury Prize in the World Documentary Competition. It struck again at the Full Frame Documentary Festival winning yet another Audience Award and a special jury prize. Currently playing at the Tribeca Film Festival, Man on Wire is a captivating look at the risks, rewards, and immortality achieved when one man focuses every fiber of his being on a life-long dream.

Philippe Petit claims to have discovered at a very early age what most of us may never find in our entire lives: his life's dedication. While sitting in a dentist's office when he was 17, Philippe saw an advertisement in a magazine for the yet-to-be-completed Twin Towers in New York City. The young French boy had begun wire walking the year before and knew immediately upon seeing the picture that unless he at least attempted to wire walk between the towers, he would consider his life a failure.

When Philippe finally accomplished the feat on August 7, 1974, he was no spring chicken to the craft of wire walking. Before that, he had performed on high wires between the towers of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and the Sydney Harbour Bridge in Australia. Both walks, just like his World Trade Center performance, were clandestine and ended with him in jail. The World Trade Center wire walk though, elevated Petit to celebrity status. After his return to France, no one involved with the stunt - be it Philippe, his crew, or the city of New York - would ever be the same again.

Director James Marsh describes Man on Wire as "a heist movie" which may seem unusual at first. After all, how complicated can it be for a professional entertainer like Philippe Petit to wirewalk across the Twin Towers? Unfathomably complicated, actually. To accomplish such a task, it wasn't simply a matter of figuring out how much equipment and what rigging was required to counteract the forces of physics at 1300+ feet. Petit and his crew also had to figure out how to sneak all that equipment (which included a bow and arrow!) up to the roof and rig it in the dead of night. The film, through black and white redramatizations and archived footage from Petit's life, chronicles the struggles that Petit faced in trying to accomplish these tasks. He would not have been able to accomplish his goal without a dedicated, motley crew and its their lives, relationships, and struggles that the film chronicles just as much as those of Petit. He had the dream, but he relied on them for the execution.

Though it is a documentary, Marsh's directing and Jinx Godfrey's editing wash away that fact to absorb you in building the excitement and tension the way a feature length heist movie would. At the center of the story is the eccentric Philippe Petit whose intoxicating personality sucks you into his story as you get caught up in his thirst for life and his celebration of dreams. He and many of the supporting cast reiterate the idea time and time again that if you can dream it you can do it. Along the way, Petit alienates some of his crew - he cheats on his girlfriend Annie and though Petit's charges are dropped, his friend Jean-Louis is expelled from the country. Despite this, everyone - including crewmembers such as Jim Moore and David Foreman who dropped out - admits that it was a beautiful moment, a once in a lifetime event, "the artistic crime of the century."

One must also take into context the time period in which the walk occurred. Petit pursued his dream during the height of the Watergate scandal and the conflict of the Vietnam War. Surrounded by hypocrisy and protest, Petit and friends embodied the jubilation that could still be found within each and every person if they just pursued their dreams. Nothing was stolen that day, but something was given. Old friend Jean-Francois Heckel bursts into tears more than once when he recalls that no matter what no one can take away what happened. "We did it." Today, a scar sits where the Twin Towers used to, a painful reminder that Petit's performance will never be duplicated. But it's for this reason, more than thirty years after the fact that it is important to remember what happened there. Perhaps, with more stories like this it'll be easier for the scars to heal.

Critical Clips
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