Movie Review: The Walk

How would you cast the role of Philippe Petit, the real-life high-wire walker who crossed the gap between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in 1974?

Do you recruit someone who exudes effortlessness, or the hardest working actor in Hollywood?

There’s an argument to be made for either, yet director Robert Zemeckis went with the latter in The Walk, recruiting energetic puppy dog Joseph Gordon-Levitt to play Petit.

Gordon-Levitt's eagerness and desperation to please can be felt in his movie roles and talk show appearances alike.

Perhaps that’s the only kind of actor who can sell an audience on this inexplicable character; an aspiring circus performer who, while reading a magazine at his Parisian dentist’s office, saw a diagram of the World Trade Center’s construction and decided to have a crack at walking across it. Who else could possibly relate?

JoGo takes to his task with relish, delivering some truly mawkish narration (scripted by Zemeckis and Christopher Browne) throughout the feature from atop New York's Statue of Liberty in, ‘ow you say, an outrageous French accent.

(“As you can probably tell, I’m not from around here,” he opens the movie, and based on his accent, we assume “here” refers to The Earth.)

Forced Frenchness aside, Gordon-Levitt wore me down. As Petit, he does the same to his co-conspirators, convincing them to help him break into the WTC so he may realise his life’s dream. Those colleagues include a young busker (Charlotte Le Bon), a Czech acrobat (Ben Kingsley) a moustachioed New York rebel (Steve Valentine) and a roguish conman (James Badge Dale). Their plotting and crafty break-in make up the majority of the picture. It’s like Ocean’s Eleven, except everyone seems to actually care about what's happening.

Who better to cinematically restage Petit's mad stroll across the NY skyline than Robert Zemeckis, the technological wizard behind Back to the Future, Cast Away and Flight?

Well, James Marsh for one. His Oscar-winning documentary Man on Wire first told Petit's story on the big screen (with plenty of thrilling reenactments and reconstructions to boot, making this update seem particularly vestigial).

What makes The Walk worth watching, however, is its final half hour, not just because of the much-vaunted high-wire act we’ve been building towards for 90 minutes, but because of what follows after.

The titular walk is indeed gut-wrenching, dizzying and even deliriously funny (Petit was mostly a comic artist, and for his audience 417 meters below, he truly put it all on the line, pun intended). Credit to Zemeckis’ technical team for bringing these fallen buildings back to life and making this centerpiece sequence so breathtaking.

However, it's when Petit steps off and the film slowly winds down to its gentle conclusion, with our hero reflecting on his relationship with the now-absent North and South Towers, that the feels begin to overwhelm.

The Walk does the rarest thing; it gives two buildings something resembling a soul. When the unspoken spectre of September 11 emerges in Petit's melancholy final monologue, The Walk manages the most skillful high-wire act of all: being moving, without stumbling.

3/5

In cinemas October 15. Preview screenings October 9, 10 and 11. Rated PG for mild themes and coarse language.