Actor on wire

The Walk 3D

Crit

I was so wowed by Man on Wire--the 2008 documentary that covers the same essential ground (or air) as this, about loony Frenchman Philippe Petit and his quest to walk a wire stretched between the twin towers of the World Trade Center--that I was prepared to hate this. But I don't; I don't really feel strongly enough about it to hate it.

In Robert Zemeckis's attempt to dramatize what could not have been more dramatic to begin with, he shoots for gripping and compelling and thrilling, but he gets only as far as interesting: if you haven't seen the other, better film, you'll certainly find your two hours and change adequately repaid, but I think you can guess what my recommendation is.

For one thing, what an asshole the guy was (maybe still is)--brilliant, unique, artistic, yes, but a manipulative, selfish bastard--is more told than shown here, and it's an essential point that all the people who helped him (including his lover of some duration) were really only his props. For another, the relation of narrative and audience to those buildings is handled much more adeptly in the earlier film. Maybe the fact that nearly a decade and a half has passed now makes it easier to look at Zemeckis's reconstruction of those unlovely, undistinguished boxes--enormous file cabinets, one character calls them--but in Man, 9/11 is never mentioned but always present. Here, the fatal day is just something we know that the characters don't until two hamhanded bits in the coda--in one, it's proposed that Petit's feat, more than a quarter of a century before the event that really accomplished this, gave the buildings "a soul" and changed the way New Yorkers felt about them; in the other, Petit (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, with a bad accent) pointedly boasts that a pass he received from the Port Authority after the walk entitles him to access to the observation deck "forever," whereupon we pan from his perch atop France's most favorite gift to America to the downtown skyline; apparently it didn't occur to Zemeckis to drive home the point by showing the skyline as it exists now. Thank god.

Trailers

• The Last Witch Hunter--You were wondering, weren't you, when Vin Diesel and Michael Caine would appear in a film together.
• Star Wars: Episode VII, The Force Awakens--The old gang is back (and old). Hard to imagine missing this; hard to imagine not being disappointed.