The Walk: Joseph Gordon-Levitt tightrope movie is literally making audiences

If Cast Away, Back to the Future, or Forrest Gump are among your personal favorites, take this review with the standard grain of salt and then give the shaker another shake.

The main event in Robert Zemeckis’s retelling of Philippe Petit’s World Trade Center tightrope walk is thrilling. As well as being in the director’s chair, Zemeckis has also teamed up with Christopher Browne to adapt Petit’s book To Reach the Clouds.

This also means that numerous supporting characters are just there to toss in their two cents, calling him insane while helping him anyway.

A film about a high-wire artist walking back and forth between the Twin Towers can’t escape the shadow of 9/11, and The Walk does its best to not only pay tribute, but portray how Petit’s walk helped bring the buildings to life for the people of New York. Is the point is to make us feel as marooned as Petit? But if I had one complaint about this movie it would be that his French accent was off-putting, at least initially – because, Dude, we know you are not French. The Twin Towers – which became Petit’s idée fixe – would be his way of telling the universe, “Monsieur, I exist!” It is unlike anything audiences have seen before, a love letter to Paris and New York City in the 1970s, but most of all, to the Towers of the World Trade Center.

This is hardly the first movie to get audiences a little nauseous.

In James Marsh’s Oscar-winning 2008 documentary Man on Wire, the real Petit came off like a hyperactive cross between Michel Gondry and Johnny Rotten, and the contagiousness of his intensity was self-explanatory. Zemeckis keeps throwing things (juggling pins, etc.) at the screen in the early sequences, and while the storybook colors and tones of “The Walk” are created to appeal to all ages, often the film simply feels pushy and insecure. Of course in those films, something was riding on the breaking and entering. He takes us to the edge of the tower and onto the very wire that Petit takes every breathtaking step.

‘Even going up 12 feet, which is about the highest we got, your brain goes, “F*** this!”

How do you handle the whole elephant-in-the-room of 9/11? The specter of 9/11 has haunted many films and been used to produce many emotions, but…nostalgia? The biggest difference? The walk itself- which wasn’t actually filmed in real life and was depicted in the documentary via re-enactments- is here rendered in gorgeous splendor, especially if you see the film in IMAX (I would not recommend seeing it any other way.) It’s quite an achievement, nerve-wracking as hell even if you know the exact outcome. Philippe drops his turtleneck, and for just a moment his accomplice on the ground thinks she sees a body falling in a disgusting death dive. But Petit’s story captures those child-like thrills, about how anything is possible in America, and how one man can achieve his dreams.

Petit narrates the film in the person of the American Joseph Gordon-Levitt, whose Franche ack-sant will certainly trigger a torrent of croaks from our friends across the pond.