New featurettes released for The Walk

While Gordon-Levitt’s French sounds admirable to these ears, his accent sounds like Peter Sellers’ immortal Inspector Clouseau. He enlists accomplices, beginning with his girlfriend Annie (Charlotte Le Bon), although none of the side characters get much development. He rips the picture out and draws a line between the two towers and proclaims that he has found the flawless place to hang his wire. To embellish this, Zemeckis shows just what his camera can do combined with state-of-the-art CGI, sweeping up and down the 115 stories of the World Trade Center easily and showing off the surrounding views, rendered in immaculate period detail. If we’ve seen the documentary (or even the trailer) we know Petit is not going to get caught before he can attempt his “coup”, and there are only so many shots of security guards slowly walking towards a protagonist hidden in the shadows only to be turned away at the point of discovery that one can take in one’s lifetime. It was an ingenious stunt that required meticulous planning. Let’s also not forget blind luck. THE WALK covers generally the same story as the documentary, of how Petit became obsessed with the World Trade Center towers and how he worked out how to do this inconceivable stunt, but THE WALK increases the dramatic effect by immersing us in the story by presenting it in fantastic 3D images. The real work was getting all the equipment to the top floor and hanging heavy wire between two buildings all while trying to evade the authorities. All of that technological mastery is on display in the film’s final 30 minutes, best seen on the biggest screen possible. Gordon-Levitt, an actor capable of tremendous brooding subtlety in films like Brick and Mysterious Skin is fully extroverted here, nearly acting as if he’s hosting an episode of Saturday Night Live. Early scenes jump around in time to detail Petit’s youthful obsession with wire-walking, and then his career as a guerilla street artist in Paris. You’ll never feel more uncomfortable watching a film when you are forced to look 1,350 feet down onto the streets of Lower Manhattan.

After a drawn out introduction that tells us Petit’s dream but not much else about him, the film morphs into essentially a heist film…but one indifferent to the mechanics of its own plan.

Yes, things get silly at times.

This film can be considered a love letter for the World Trade Center that was lost on September 11, 2001.

All the performances are good, but Gordon-Levitt and Ben Kingsley, as Petit’s mentor Papa Rudy, a member of a legendary family of circus high-wire performers, are particular stand-outs. The tone of the whole film, or at least everything leading up to the walk, is surprisingly broad and childlike-each New York cop with his “Hey, I’m walkin” “ere!” accent, each bit of narration delivered by Gordon-Levitt from atop the torch of the Statue of Liberty (really), gives the film the texture of a for-all-ages educational video. He trained with Philippe Petit, now 66, and his partner Kathy in an unused warehouse near their home in upstate New York.