The MoFo Movie Club Discussion Thread: Man on Wire

Man on Wire (2008, James Marsh)



There's something about Man on Wire that left me with a big smile on my face, and it was nothing to do with humour. The triumph of one man's free spirit perhaps, the sheer audacity of what he achieved maybe, I don't know for sure yet...

He's an interesting character, is Philippe Petit.

Man on Wire charts his 1974 tightrope crossing (or crossings - he traversed that mind-blowing gap 8 times in a 45 minute period) between the World Trade Centre's Twin Towers, the planning and the aftermath. The film begins in the way of a TV bank heist drama documentary with some talking heads and unconvincing faux period 'footage' to heighten the drama. What stopped me arching my eyebrows was Petit himself - there's an almost hypnotic wide (but not wild) eyed charm about the man and when it's coupled with his disarmingly poetic (and French) way of phrasing sentences it draws you right in and all thoughts of a dry TV documentary are banished forever. Fortunately the 'dramatic reconstruction' moments are few and far between thereafter...



The period footage of Petit practising (presumably at home) is charming in its innocence. It is also pretty irresistible in capturing what a skilled performer he was on the high wire. There are backward rolls, nonchalant danderings with hands behind back and some amazing footage of Philippe's friends pulling on the cable with all their weight and strength to try and simulate the weather conditions he would encounter on his big day. Needless to say, Petit was totally unphased.

What struck me was how easy it was for him and 3 or 4 friends to lug half a ton of equipment to the top of the towers (they were constructed but not yet totally finished) and rig up what looked like a two inch thick metal cable between them, all done the night before the event and, of course, without the knowledge or permission of anyone in New York. Life was evidently much simpler twenty years before the War On Terror but the brash nievity of the young daredevil carried him along much much further than even he dared imagine. Philippe's friends seemed to serve the dual purpose of helping in the coup's execution and dragging his feet back to ground level when his thoughts were just too fanciful.

The endearingly emotional way in which they recount events (particularly Jean-Louis) strikes a chord although I got the feeling they weren't altogether joyous at being pulled along in the wake of Petit's whirlwind personality. I've got to give the man kudos for having a crafty shag with a groupie while his mates (and long-suffering girlfriend) presumed he was doing another press interview, however.



All things considered (ok, some things considered!) I thought Man on Wire was great. The director has said that he wants to give the people of New York back some happier memories of the Twin Towers and, in that sense, it's mission accomplished.

What he has also done is paint the picture of what was essentially a massive ego-trip in such a way (props also go out to the cleverly-assembled score) that I was left moved by the Quixotic beauty of it all.

He's an interesting character, is Philippe Petit. And I'm still smiling.



What does everyone else think?

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When I first began watching, I couldn't fathom why the others were going along with this seemingly crazy idea, (a few backed out) but by the end I was thinking how much I would have liked to be a part of something like that.

I found Jean-Louis to be almost as interesting as Phillipe. Without much stake in it for himself, he seemed to be almost as obsessed and passionate about it as Phillipe himself. It was also interesting to note how completely opposite they were.

I really, really liked this. One of my favorite parts was when Phillipe began talking about his childhood and why he may of become what he became. He doesn't go to far into it, when he kind of shrugs it off and it's apparent that it doesn't matter too much to him. Another is at the end when he is talking about the Americans reaction to what he just did. What he says to their question of why is that there is no why. I loved that.

It gets a 4.5 from me. I thought it was wonderful

This documentary was exhilarating!!! I admire the courage of Philippe Petit and the people that helped him. Philippe Petit is so talented. I thought this movie was going to be boring but I really enjoyed it. The last half hour of the movie I had goose bumps. The pictures were breathtaking. I thought it was funny how the movie got it name by the complaint box on the police report filled in as Man on Wire. I wondered why it was named that. Kind of weird at the end with the random nudity scene that came out of nowhere. Cool but very scary when you think about how he was able to pull this off without any suspicion? I recommend this movie to everyone.

I give Man On Wire

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I wrote about this in Movie Tab II a few weeks ago. This is what I said:

By now, most people should understand that my ratings tend to be lower than most raters. I really did enjoy the film, but when I went ahead and watched it a second time, I came away with most of the same feelings. Although I don't especially find the recreations a debit, I believe that there are quite a few more, sprinkled throughout the film, than Tatty does. It's not so much that they negate from the awesome accomplishment, it's that it opens the door to providing embroidery to what actually happened and how it happened. I have no reason to believe that anybody lied about all the various flying back and forth, getting and losing accomplices and the timelines. I believe it basically went down the way they say. It just seems to me, without the recreations, they don't really have enough material for a full-blooded documentary feature.



Now, I want to say that what they do have is spectacular, intense, humorous and often poetic. I agree with Tatty that the use of music is inspired, and the new theme conducted by Michael Nyman is a super cool-sounding heist movie-type piece. I was almost as enthralled with Petit's capers at Notre Dame and Sydney as I was with his pičce de résistance. I'm about 95% certain that it will win Best Documentary Feature, although I'm still waiting to see what else gets nominated. Let's see, I'm starting to ramble, but I also have to wonder, like mikey, about the inclusion of the A Clockwork Orange-type, sped-up sex scene thrown into the ending of the film, apparently for "full disclosure". During both of my viewings, I felt like I was just about to cross over a line where the movie completely won me over, but just as I was expecting maybe another two or three minutes of transcendence, the end credits began to roll.

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Man on Wire was a fun, cool movie. I really liked it! The fact that somebody could be so crazy and yet so courageous and determined, and still survive the experience was what I admired about the guy. It was a hair-raising feat, but he did it. Too bad about his arrest and subsequent expulsion from the United States, though.

I think you misunderstood some of the movie. Petit, the actual "wire-walker" received a lifetime pass to be able to go to the top of the World Trade Center. It was one of his colleagues, Jean-François, who was expelled at the time.

I totally understand what you're getting at here. For the first 15 minutes or so I was wondering how they would try to spin the story out to that of a feature length movie. It felt like a good BBC TV doc at that point but nothing more.

The dramatic reconstructions felt a bit 'Crimewatch' initially but it was the interviews with Petit and his cohorts which pulled me, and the film, back from the abyss marked Average. I've never been a fan of street performers - been to Edinburgh one too many times when The Fringe is on, probably - and I'm as cynical as you when it comes to believing every last beat of the story (I really want to believe the crafty shag, though!) but there was enough believability there for me to go along with the flow.

Incidentally, the way Man on Wire was constructed reminded me of Touching the Void. I bought into things more this time, though, and felt that it justified a 90 minute (as opposed to 60, premiered between the evening news and Match of the Day on a Saturday night in November) running time - this was the reservation I always had against Touching the Void.

Perhaps it's time I revisited Kevin MacDonald's movie?

I almost forgot I really enjoyed the music played throughout the film.

Yeah me too Tatty. I didn't know a thing about this guy either. My wife kept asking me if he made it or not and I lovingly suggested to her to watch the film since I didn't know either. It seemed pretty likely however since I doubt they'd take the time to make a documentary if he failed. Seems like that would be rather boring.

Indeed. The French to me are pretty fascinating people, they make excellent movies, (usually) and a good number of them seem so passionate about even the smallest of things. To be honest I wish I was French... I admire their culture.

I thought that stuff was by far the best parts of the film, I also loved all the interviews. I found that I could've just listened to them all talk and probably enjoyed it just as much. All of them were so interesting. Jean Louis in particular. It was obvious that even after all these years he still really cared a great deal about his former best friend. Which in a way was also kind of sad, don't you think? He didn't really go into detail when he said it was the end of their freindship but we were talking about it afterward and weren't sure if he meant it was because of the sexcaped Petit had or because of just how emotionally involved and draining the whole experience was. What does everyone else think?



I loved all of that as well. I think I could have stood to seen a bit more about the man Petit himself. But that's OK. Unless I take the time to Google him he'll always remain a bit of a mystery and perhaps he likes it that way.

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Oh and Mark may be 95% certain but I'm 100% certain this is going to win an Oscar... just sayin'.

I hadn't heard of him before the film either. His Wikipedia entry is 99% concerned with the walk between the Twin Towers but mentions that he's now one of the artists in residence at the Cathedral of St John the Divine in NYC, the name of which you can see on his shirt in some sequences of the film.

There's a really nice little biog and interview, however, here. It's from long before the film was made, too.

I'm with you 100% buddy. My ex-mother in law is French and we used to travel over there as often as we could (me and the wife, not me and the mother in law ).



It took me a few minutes to work out that the period films weren't actually more dramatic reconstructions like the 'heist' bits of the film. Dipstick here figured it out when the actors playing Philippe and his girlfriend were uncannily like their 'real life' selves. *ahem*

Re: The broken friendships. I guess it's pretty clear that Jean-Louis was Petit's version of the angel on his shoulder, the sensible one who pulled him back from the brink when his fancy took the better of him. It's pure guesswork here but I'm imagining that, in the aftermath of his newly found fame, Philippe didn't really need someone constantly bringing him back down to earth and when the fame subsided the friendship had a gap that even he couldn't traverse.

Saw this over the weekend, but didn't get a chance to sit down and reply until now.

I liked it fine, but wasn't as enamored as most of you guys. Petit is an interesting character, but I felt that, at times, he kind of upstaged the event itself. Not sure I particularly liked him as a person, either, and I've never known anyone with that level of obsession and single-mindedness to be a terribly easy person to get along with. Probably not fair for such a thing to color my view of the film, but so it goes.

I also didn't completely buy into the lofty terms used to describe the act. It was daring and lovely, to be sure, but I didn't find it quite as sublime as the filmmakers and participants did. I thought it was pretty, but not beautiful. Ironically enough, I think Petit was the only person involved who didn't see it as being something larger than the people involved.

I'm pretty torn on the reenactments. Most were okay, but there were probably a few too many. I don't know if the ones of Petit on a unicycle were reenacted (I assume so), but those ones stuck out a bit and felt too produced, I thought. Ditto for the ones with the guards in the WTC -- I would've preferred to just hear the story. I can forgive the reenactment in the beginning, since it feeds into the whole "heist" angle, which I thought was a nice way to look at it. All the fun of a bank heist without harming anyone.

The only real gripe I have with the reenactments, come to think of it, is that it had me constantly wondering what footage was real, and what wasn't. There was a surprising amount of footage, and lots of photographs, and I feel it'd have been a bit more powerful to know that everything we were seeing was real. Reenactments may have been defensible under different circumstances, but it seems there was a lot of documentation already.

I do agree, by the by, that it felt stretched at points, and would be better if it were a bit shorter.

That said, and at the risk of sounding cynical, I can't help but wonder if a few facts were stretched. The groupie thing, for one (seems so out of place), but I'm having trouble accepting the idea that they had so many close calls with the guards in the towers. Really, they sat there for hours? They walked by a guard apparently sleeping with his eyes open? One of them came up to the roof in the middle of the night and Petit mirrored his movements so as to stay out of his line of sight? It all seems so improbable, and if anything is going to be embellished over the years, it'd be details like this.

All that said, it was still quite interesting, and there's no doubt that Petit has tremendous talent. He seemed to be a short fellow, so the low center of gravity surely helped, but my jaw hit the floor when I saw his friends pulling the test wire up and down. It's pretty crazy to think that the more talented wirewalkers can withstand that sort of thing.

I thought it was interesting that Petit was so nervous beforehand, but stayed on the wire for 45 minutes when he finally got there. I'm guessing that the conditions were such that he really just had no idea what the wind would be like at that level, and once he got on and realized it felt similar to his previous efforts, he was at ease. For someone as skilled as he is, it almost seems as if the only real danger was in the unknown variables -- if those don't interfere, he might as well be in that field at home as on top of the World Trade Center.

Anyway, I'll give it .

Where's your sense of romance, man?

The parts of Petit's tale that can be categorically proven are so fantastical that I have no reason to believe he would lie about some of the little details but it's fair to assume that Philippe and his chums may well have embellished certain parts over the years (either knowingly or unknowingly). I don't think it deters from anything in this instance, though, and personally I see no reason to doubt him.

I'm pretty sure that the only parts of the film which were reconstructed were the bits in the Twin Towers. If you look closely at the unicycle sequences you'll see Philippe riding through what looks suspiciously like 60s/70s London (the RHD cars, reg plates, traffic lights and so on) which would be mighty hard to fake as convincingly, and begs the question why they didn't fake 60s/70s Paris.

I've got no proof to back this up but I would imagine the footage comes from a local news report about a crazy French guy entertaining London commuters. It's the same bloke from the high wire home movies, after all.

Well...

1. I agree. I think it was wise to celebrate the Twin Towers instead of mourn them. If memory serves they don't even make mention of 9/11 which is the wise decision. I loved the fancy free attitude of the film.

2. Petit deserves to have an ego trip painted of him. I know I couldn't do what he did. Though I did once snreak on top of a 800 foot skyscraper under construction in Chicago, walk along the edge, and took a piss of the top ... but that's different.

3. Yes he is very interesting and has an amazing vitallity in the way he tells his story.

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Yoda... I agree with you that the person did almost upstage the material. Petit is an interesting character. And it's his obssession with the feat that's almost as fascinating as the character himself. In this regarded I had a lot of the same emotion towards the man/doc as I did with Treadwell in Grizzly Man.

Two complete nut-jobs with crazy obsessions, but God bless em' both.

I liked Treadwell a whole heck of a lot more. I felt his obsession was more, well, real. I don't think any part of it was really for show...I felt like he believed through and through that he had to do what he did, and didn't care what anyone thought of him. It was kind of scary, really; I think all genuine obsession is.

Petit, I think, has a bit of a salesman/self-promotional streak in him. Which is all well and good -- I don't begrudge him that. But I always felt like he was trying to convince me of something. Like he was trying to persuade me of the greatness of what happened. It's entirely possible this is all in my head, but I felt this way pretty acutely, and having just written it down and looked at it, I realize it perfectly describes my feelings on Man on Wire.

I agree and I think you're absolutely correct.

If most people on a scale of 1-10, 10 being most obsessed and insane, were a 2-3, Petit would be a 9, Treadwell would be a 100.

Yeah Petit promoted himself... so he was a salesman. Treadwell also was a salesman, but he was selling his concepts and idealogy not himself.

And yes I do find Treadwell more compelling.

I had the same issues with figuring out which clips were real and which weren't ... but I assumed early on that the black-and-white (or rather, no-full-color) shots were recreations and that the color shots were real. Most of that assessment came from the clothing being too realistic and the faces of the people involved being exactly the same but younger.

Did anyone else notice the color/B&W distinction?

By the end, I was painfully aware that they weren't mentioning the collapse of the Towers, so I had to check the sleeve to see what the date of the movie was. It seemed almost conspicuously absent, especially with footage of the groundwork being laid of the Towers -- and it looking so eerily like Ground Zero shots we've all come to know so well.

I personally am curious about how Petit feels about the Towers being gone -- probably a lot of sadness, but also perhaps a sense of "No one will ever recreate what I did." Or some odd sense of finality like that. I agree, though, that ultimately, the movie is better served by leaving all references to 9/11 out.

I too found the groupie bit at the end oddly out of place. It seemed almost Benny-Hill-ish and stupid, right at a moment when I was letting out the breath I'd been holding for the past half-hour.

And where the heck did that encounter take place? Wasn't he still being closely watched at that point? At any rate, I guess I can understand the adrenaline-based reasons for it, but honestly, why not just, errrrr, GO FIND THE GIRLFRIEND WHO'D BEEN STANDING BEHIND YOU AND SUBSUMING HER WHOLE EXISTENCE INTO YOURS?

(sigh)

Petit surely is a showman, especially now that his glory days are behind him. And although I'd never want to be friends with an ego that big or be in a relationship that's so clearly one-sided, I have to admit: If anyone ever had a reason to rest on his laurels, it'd be Phillippe Petit.

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I'll agree that Grizzly Man is the better film but personally wouldn't compare them too closely.

Mad Werner had 100s of hours of film (maybe 1000s) with which to fashion Treadwell's vainglorious trips to Alaska while I'm guessing that James Marsh had little more than what we saw on screen.

Both films deal with obsession though, but maybe I'm alone here in thinking that Petit was the more sympathetic character. I was gonna try to explain why but Treadwell and Petit are two vastly different characters, I think, so it would be a bit pointless. Let's just say that, for all his blarney, I really like Philippe and have the feeling that he would have done exactly the same thing if no cameras were ever pointed in his direction because, ultimately, his walk was about the challenge, the vibe, the groove he hoped to experience when he got there, that kind of thing.

Then again, I'm a self-confessed Francophile...

One thing that both documentaries have in common is fantastic music, however, and I think I've still got time this evening to give Grizzly Man another watch. Thanks guys for putting the idea in my head.

EDIT - Grizzly Man 3min 35sec: "Over 100 hours of footage"

That's me told.

I think what I liked about Petit's character was the constant likening what he was doing to a bank heist -- only, as he put it, not hurting anyone. (Well, assuming he didn't fall, of course.) To him it was the thrill of doing something technically illegal but yet not immoral or shameful.

He did it because it was there. The fact that he couldn't quite fathom why Americans wanted to know why says a lot, I think, about his type of obsession. It was very personal to him, and yes, I agree that he'd probably have done exactly the same thing without the notoriety.