The Walk

The Walk (12A)

USA 2015 123 mins Dir: Robert Zemeckis Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Charlotte Le Bon, Ben Kingsley, James Badge Dale, Ben Schwartz

In 1974, daredevil Frenchman Philippe Petit completed the extraordinary achievement of walking on a tightrope between the soaring towers of New York’s newly opened World Trade Centre. Petit’s astonishing achievement has been recounted to gripping effect in James Marsh’s 2004 documentary Man on Wire, but of course that movie didn’t get us onto the wire itself. Step forward Back to the Future director Robert Zemeckis, whose new film The Walk fills the pivotal absence of Marsh’s film and places us alongside Petit 1350 feet up. But even with this crucial gain, The Walk is undeniably a story of two halves: one frivolous and flippant, the other genuinely engrossing and palm-sweating.

Nevertheless, although if it’s a far from a seamless movie experience, it’s heartening to see the visionary Zemeckis once again rooted in the world of live-action following the 2012 Denzel Washington-starrer Flight. If his misguided attempts at mo-cap animations with the likes of The Polar Express and A Christmas Carol have surely taught Zemeckis anything, it’s that special effects have more impact when he merges them with flesh and blood storytelling.

But then Zemeckis has always been an underrated narrative craftsman, whether he’s slyly merging Chinatown with the world of cartoon characters in Who Framed Roger Rabbit or amusingly dropping Tom Hanks into real archive news footage in Forrest Gump. And let’s not forget that Back to the Future II took us back to the world of its enduringly popular predecessor and replayed key scenes from different angles, scrambling the jigowatts of our brains.

Even so, a director is only as good as his material and the first half of The Walk is somewhat cloying. Doing a Ferris Bueller and breaking the fourth wall, Petit (as played by Looper’s Joseph Gordon-Levitt) addresses us the audience from the torch of the Statue of Liberty, the haunting vista of the Twin Towers looming large over both the narrative to come and also our collective memories. We then zip back in time to the land of onions, stripy jumpers and accordions as Petit explains his New York ambitions began with relatively modest tightrope acts in Paris.

Schooled by former high wire artist Papa Rudy (Ben Kingsley, of no-fixed-accent syndrome), Petit soon finds he has a flair for the theatrical and a love of a rapt audience. However, it’s a newspaper article of the soon-to-be-opened World Trade Centre that really puts fire in his belly: soaring above his home country’s Eiffel Tower, it’s the ideal stage for Petit to show off his skills to the world, a view from God’s balcony 400 metres up that will really test what a human being is capable of. Recruiting a series of associates for his so-called ‘coup’ including fellow street performer and eventual girlfriend Annie (Charlotte Le Bon), Petit travels to Manhattan to put his seemingly foolhardy plan into action.

The description of the walk sequence itself should be spared to maximise its vertiginous, palm-sweating impact. Suffice it to say, the moment proves scarier and more engrossing than most horror movies, Zemeckis, along with cinematographer Dariusz Wolski, typically making full use of advances in digital technology to craft a slice of pure cinema that’s nail-biting and spiritually haunting at the same time. It’s at this point where the movie redeems the somewhat wonky first hour, dominated as it is by an unconvincing sense of Gallic whimsy and Gordon-Levitt’s ‘pissing by’ accent (that the actor circumvents this through his natural impish charisma makes the problem somewhat more palatable).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s as if Zemeckis is in a bit of a rush to get through the contextual, autobiographical stuff at the beginning and open his box of moviemaking toys during the walk itself. And open them he does: at this moment the movie attains a greater sense of focus, Gordon-Levitt is able to throw more emphasis onto the physical nature of his performance and Alan Silvestri’s elegiac score (his fifteenth collaboration with the director) captures the wonder and balletic dignity of Petit’s remarkable achievement. Much like Petit’s own journey, there are bumps in the road but once the final goal is in sight, the movie never puts a foot wrong.