I love me a good documentary, so I was pumped to watch this based solely on the excellent word-of-mouth. It’s about a crazy French dude named Petit who decided one day that he was going to walk a tightrope between the Twin Towers (which, at the time of his idea, hadn’t actually been built yet).
I remember vaguely hearing about this when I was a 70s youngster, but I had always assumed that he had done it as a publicity stunt in league with the city or something. Turns out I was wrong - what they did was hilariously illegal. The film wisely decides to turn the story into a crime caper that’s more than a little reminiscent of classic French crime movies a la Raffifi. Less impressively, the director seems to really want to be Errol Morris, exchanging Michael Nyman for Philip Glass. That’s a niggle, though, because the story itself is absolutely phenomenal. Even though you can clearly see they got away with it, you keep expecting Petit to slip off that tiny wire and die at any moment.
Anyway, this is a really great doc, and definitely entertaining enough even if you’re not super into documentaries.
I’m very much looking forward to this. I came across this guy while reading children’s books to my 5 year old cousin - the book is The Man who Walked Between the Towers and is lovely for little kids.
I thought the movie was at once joyful and then quietly sad. It manages this great feeling of wonder, like when the cop says he felt like he was watching something really special. However, it also very subtly alludes to the fact that the feat can now never be duplicated due to 9/11. I like docs like this because the characters contained within almost seem too good to be true (as in, for example, King of Kong which I just saw the other day) but they turn out to be naturally larger than life and thus their impact is that much greater.
