STUDIO: Magnolia
RELEASE DATE: August 8, 2008
STARRING: Philippe Petit
DIRECTED BY: James Marsh
GENRE: Documentary
RATING: PG-13

"If I die, what a beautiful death to die in the exercise of your passion." Philippe Petit is totally insane. Of course, I'm exaggerating a bit, but what would you call someone who walked, harness-free on a wire between the two towers of the World Trade Center, hundreds of feet above the ground? As someone who had trouble looking straight down from the eleventh-floor window of his apartment, I'd call Philippe totally insane. But he's also passionate and riveting, a documentary filmmaker's dream come true. He's such an impassioned and energetic interview subject that it's remarkable that someone didn't make Man on Wire earlier. Director James Marsh (The King) is lucky that no one did because it's allowed this filmmaker to produce one of the more interesting documentaries of the year, if not quite one of the best.

The title of Man on Wire comes from the "details of complaint" section in the New York Police Department report about what happened on August 7th, 1974. Overnight, Philippe Petit and a team of collaborators had set up a wire system from one tower of the World Trade Center to the other. That's even harder to do than it sounds. Not only did they have security to deal with, but they had to rig their system in pitch black night at a height that would make anyone nauseous. How do you get a wire from one tower to the other? What if it's windy? What if they get caught? It's damn-near miraculous that they pulled it off. The next morning, Petit stepped out into the history books. He had done something similar at Notre Dame and the Sydney Harbor Bridge, but this was a dream come true for a boy who reportedly fantasized about the towers of the World Trade Center when he first read about them being built. Most people have a dream and can find a way to physically obtain it, but when your passion is a pair of towers, what better way to represent that than to pull off the most daring artistic crime of the century?

Philippe is such a powerfully fascinating man and what he did is so remarkable that the fast-paced, thriller-esque 90 minutes devoted to him in Man on Wire doesn't quite seem like enough. Has a documentary done its job if you feel like you're satisfied on the subject or if it makes you want to learn more? It's a tough question, but Man on Wire does more of the latter, giving viewers a suspenseful, detailed account of what happened on that windy morning in 1974 but not really placing it in a lot of context either within Petit's life, NYC, or wire-walking in general. When Petit was finally brought in by police, he expressed shock that people wanted to know "why" he did it. There is no "why" and that mentality seems to have influenced Marsh's take on the film, but that doesn't mean that there couldn't have been a broader context to this fascinating story.

Marsh has clearly been inspired by the creative way that Errol Morris approaches the world, using reenactments and a consistent score by Mark Nyman in much the same way that the doc master would have done. Honestly, I thought several times that, other than the direction of the interviews (Morris' are always straight-to-camera, using his patented "Interrotron"), Man on Wire is close to exactly the movie that Morris would have made with the same material. Documentary fans will know, that's a huge compliment. Marsh has taken something that could have been dry in another filmmaker's hands and made it more riveting than most of the thrillers I've seen this year. But he almost seems too intent on matching the driving force of Petit's personality with his filmmaking. I wanted Man on Wire to take a break every now and then and I really wanted Petit's accomplishment placed in perspective with what others have done before him. Is he the only man to wire-walk a major building? What happened after the WTC affair? We get very little background or material about Petit's life after the biggest day he ever had and that seems like a wasted opportunity. Then again, for Philippe, it was all about the moment, about truly living life on the edge. You won't be disappointed if you go there with him for 90 minutes in Man on Wire.