For the final 40 minutes of Robert Zemeckis’ The Walk, a playful caper adapted from the true story of Philippe Petit, a high-wire artist that walked between the Twin Towers in New York, we held our breath and only exhaled to yell instructions at the screen: “No, don’t do it!”
Awe-inspiring, spellbinding, mesmerizing, enthralling, entrancing, and many more of these “ings,” The Walk, like Gravity before it, is a technical achievement that must be seen on the biggest screen with the best sound, and oh, that’s only if you’re comfortable with heights — around 1,350 feet, to be exact.
Based on the same story as James Marsh’s acclaimed documentary Man On Wire, we trace Petit’s early life like a conventional biopic (this is the least inspired portion of the film), but the film mostly takes place leading up to his “artistic coup.”
Through meticulously composed shots, breathtaking visual effects, and a confident performance by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Zemeckis recreates Petit’s three-hour tightrope walk with poetic tension. Devoid of explosions or cynicism, this is one of the best popcorn movies of the year, and one of the most exuberant and exciting cinematic experiences of my life.
While most of my favorite films of the year come from the art-house circuit, The Walk is the only recent movie that has given me a singular sensation — the movie magic we used to feel as kids and the excitement of being transported by a filmmaker’s rapturous imagination. So far removed from the darkness that has plagued mainstream films in our post-9/11 age, the gleeful optimism in The Walk nearly brought me to tears, even as Petit walks between the two signifiers of human accomplishment that will eventually come crashing down.
But this is precisely the point: The Walk isn’t just marvelous entertainment, it’s also a restoration of our desire to climb higher, to build bigger, and to aspire to do anything we can imagine. It’s an act of mourning with the inspiration to finally move past the fear and the darkness.
Recent efforts like Interstellar and Tomorrowland have tried to convey a similar message, yet both of those films lacked The Walk’s clear-eyed fun. With its unabashed warmth and love, the only recent film it can be compared to is Martin Scorsese’s Hugo. Except, where Scorsese’s love was for the cinema, Zemeckis’ is for humanity.
In the final stretch of The Walk, after Petit has completed his “artistic coup” with his “accomplices,” the tightrope artist is given a “lifetime” pass to the tops of the World Trade Center. Of course, to everyone in the audience, they know this is tragically false. The Walk takes place in 1974, but so many moments of the film are about what would happen close to forty years later. The most eerie shot of the film is not when Petit lays down on a wire almost half a kilometer in the air, but the final shot which fades out on the Twin Towers — a hint of what was to come.
The symbol of human accomplishment may have fallen to fanaticism and hatred, but Zemeckis is trying to resurrect it. Standing on the symbolic Statue of Liberty — emblematic of Western values — Petit narrates his story without ever attributing any motive or reason for his walk. He becomes a broad symbol of human capability.
The Walk may be one of the most exciting and jaw-dropping films of 2015, but it’s also a delicate one that invites us to walk across its tightrope to a world built on optimism and ambition, not fear or cynicism.
