The Walk (2015)

Robert Zemeckis is probably the first director that I knew by name, and he has made many of my favorite films over the years, the Back To The Future trilogy, Who Framed Roger Rabbit,  Contact, Castaway and Forrest Gump. However I feel like I've been neglecting him of late, until last week the most recent of his movies that I'd seen was The Polar Express, and that was more then 10 years ago.  I'd intended to see The Walk but never got to it, so when it ended up back in the local dollar theater last week I made a priority of seeing it, and I'm glade I did. The Walk tells the story of French 'wire walker' Philippe Petit, and his successful 1974 traverse of the then new Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. "1,350 feet (400 meters) above the ground, he rigged a 450-pound (200-kilogram) cable and used a custom-made 26-foot (8-metre) long, 55-pound (25-kilogram) balancing pole. He performed for 45 minutes, making eight passes along the wire. The next week, he celebrated his 25th birthday."-Wikipedia.

As amazing and impressive as this feet was it is made more remarkable, and more interesting as a movie plot, by the fact that Petit and a small group of confederates made this event happen on their own, illegally, and after many months of secret planning, though Petit himself came up with the idea of performing 'the walk' when he first learned the Twin Towers were to built in 1968. The movie of course focuses on this seminal event in the charismatic Frenchman's life, though it does manage to work in his relationships with his mentor the (Czech?) wire walker Papa Rudy (Ben Kingsley) and his then girlfriend Annie Allix (Charlotte Le Bon, very lovely). Petit's story it goes without saying has been told many times before, most notably in the Oscar winning 2008 documentary Man on Wire (which I haven't seen), though I think Zemeckis tells the tale in what is probably its perfect medium, on the big screen in 3D, if you have an opportunity to see it this way you really should.

So the visuals of course are outstanding and the story solidly engaging, a real ode to tireless determination and achieving ones dream, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt's portal of Petit so charming and natural that its really a more impressive performance then it might at first appear. The exquisite melding of human story with state of the art visual effects is what Zemeckis does so well, and so naturally that it to is a performance whose true greatness might not at first register. I don't think this movie could have been done any better. ****