Man on Wire is perhaps the most disgustingly overrated film of the past decade; that its undeserved Oscar was awarded on the same night the repugnant Slumdog Millionaire walked away with eight statues is apropos enough. Perhaps the widespread acceptance of this film is the real “artistic crime of the century”. We have nothing but a pandering hagiography founded on the wrongheaded thesis that tightrope walking in public places somehow translates to High Art, and breaking numerous laws while endangering the lives of countless innocent people is okay so long as nobody gets hurt in the process.
Phillipe Petit, a skilled tightrope walker, prides himself on impromptu demonstrations of his limited, yet admittedly formidable skills. The caveat is that he feels compelled to do it in highly populated areas, at considerable height, without any prior announcement. Does this make him a de facto artist, or just a ballsy stuntman with a sociopathic disdain for rules and regulations? If a public performance better suited for patrons of Barnum and Bailey can be considered an artistic achievement, then so can the Wild West Stunt Show at Six Flags.
But director James Marsh, who helmed the far superior and tragically underseen Wisconsin Death Trip, unwisely goes ahead with this wild assumption and heaps tons of fawning praise over Petit via endless talking heads and annoying interjections from the man himself. In a roundabout fashion, the tale of “Le Coup“, an illogical and illegal tightrope walk between the unopened Twin Towers, is recounted by Petit and his former accomplices. We see re-enactments of Petit and crew setting up their equipment, complete with Goodwill costumes and peeling adhesive sideburns. “When I first saw [architectural sketches of] the Towers, I knew I had to do it,” he proclaims. It makes perfect sense in that the scale of the buildings somehow matched the scale of his boundless ego.
Cutting between the poorly mounted re-enactments and rose-colored recollections of Petit’s formative years, the flash-forward structure not only kills tension but also unnecessarily convolutes the timeline. Here it is used to synthesize suspense, and it fails with great aplomb. Perhaps Marsh wasn’t sure we would sustain interest through half an hour of home movies and Petit’s former conquests fawning over the man, intercut with his own undoubtedly exaggerated stories. A balanced approach, considering all possible viewpoints, is impossible because no one in the film has any ill to say about him whatsoever. This lighthearted, fluffy treatment of a multifaceted and, let’s face it, downright sinister subject becomes grating in a hurry. Our All Honky Caper, Le Coup, taking place in 1974, is the only interesting thing going on, and it’s interesting for all the wrong reasons.
All the factual aspects, involving fake IDs, stolen blueprints, and a nighttime ascent to the top story of the guarded WTC complex are believable enough. Since we know that Petit and company pull off this ludicrous crime, there’s no suspense whatsoever, but what complications arise are recounted by Petit himself with a clarity that belies the temporal distance from the events in question. See, it’s not enough that the Port Authority fuzz came snooping around the 104th floor and the crew had to hide. According to Petit, they had to throw a tarp over themselves and stay motionless. And they happened to be on a tiny plank which happened to be over an elevator shaft! And the cop just happened to light his cigarette and stand right next to the shrouded team! And they stayed unmoving for five hours after that!!
If the man weren’t so damned charismatic, it would have been impossible to convince all his hapless friends to support him on his mission of pure, unadulterated onanism. That fact in itself is remarkable, and again, undoubtedly sinister in nature. There must be a good reason he doesn’t share the room with his former accomplices: he can’t share credit at all. As the title of the film suggests, the Man on Wire is the be-all-end-all of this subject. He walked his wire alone, he basked in temporary infamy, and would have faded into well-deserved obscurity were it not for this documentary. Petit milks his time in the limelight for all it’s worth; his self-aggrandizing nature is excruciating and his dismissal of not only his assistants but also the consequences of his reckless behavior becomes increasingly disturbing. Man on Wire should have been a short subject.
While we may be groping in the dark for some sort of Herzogian synthesis between fact and fiction, it’s almost a certainty that Petit’s accounts are distorted, willingly or not. That some of these are re-enacted adds to the surrealism. It’s hard not to laugh when Petit claims to strip off his clothes to feel around for a strand of fishing line attached to an arrow shot from Building 1 (which turns out to be dangling on the edge of a yawning chasm, natch); even funnier when it’s re-enacted in a dramatic fashion. It didn’t occur to him to bring a flashlight? No, of course not, because history has been conveniently altered to portray Petit as a dashing man of mystery willing to take whatever risks were necessary to pull off his ego-stroking publicity stunt.
The fact that this clown didn’t die during his quarter-mile-high walk isn’t reason enough to care about his story. The fact that he didn’t drop anything from that ludicrous height isn’t some kind of miracle. His showboating isn’t some kind of artwork in the same sense that a painting or a film is a work of art. Perhaps the individual pictures, the only existing record of his suicidal tightrope walk, could be artistic. Perhaps the ridiculous caper is artistic, in the same way that a well-executed bank robbery is artistic; likewise the only rewards were those reaped for personal gain. Celebrity is a fickle thing, all right, and as an exploration of the nature of fame and the wages of infamy, Man on Wire succeeds in fits and starts. In all honesty it can only be considered a success if viewed as a very dark character study, much like Barbet Schroeder’s documentary account of General Idi Amin Dada. Only with less violence and far more ego-stroking insanity.
To bolster Marsh’s public-spectacle-as-art thesis, we are subjected to glowing accounts of the day of Le Coup, from astounded bystanders who claimed to “see a man walking on air”. From the vantage point of the sidewalk below, Petit must have appeared as nothing more than a moving dot. From the point of view of the policemen waiting to arrest the fool, he must have been nothing more than an amusing nuisance, like a roof-jumper with a bit more panache. His arrest was inevitable, his immediate release was unreasonable and misguided. He should have been sent directly to an asylum for psychiatric help.
Could he look more smug in that picture? From his own account, the policemen gave him a round of applause upon his entry into the precinct building, and after his improbably faithful accomplices posted bail for his release, he allegedly left them all waiting in the lobby while he boned some fawning groupie. This dubiously factual event is re-enacted in a fashion similar to Alex DeLarge’s hyper-speed threesome in A Clockwork Orange, and is about as hilarious. If we were to bring up the subject of what would have happened if Petit fell a quarter mile to the busy streets below, instead of basking in post-arrest sexual relations, the proceedings would be a lot less warm and fuzzy, but the levity would be a refreshing counterpoint to the preceding 85-minute blowjob.
What about the poor Port Authority guards who were probably fired over the incident? What about Petit’s accomplices who share their recollections with much less enthusiasm than their glory-mongering compatriot? What about, God forbid, a single dissenting viewpoint? Maybe someone with a more level-headed view of things? Alas, what we are left with is a very strange glorification of reckless endangerment, an endorsement of sociopathic risk-taking, a documentary with more fabrications than most fictional films. Herzog’s nihilistic Encounters at the End of the World predictably lost out in the Oscar race to this crowdpleasing ode to artistic masturbation, and so it goes: a comforting illusion will always triumph over cold, stark reality.
