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Wednesday, January 20, 2016

MOVIE REVIEW/The Walk (2015)
Histrionics And High-Wire Torture In The NYC Sky

Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Philippe Petit in Robert Zemeckis's drama "The Walk".  Sony 
       
by Omar P.L. Moore/PopcornReel.com        Follow popcornreel on Twitter FOLLOW                                           
Wednesday, January 20, 2016

 “The Walk” is a piercing, cynical exercise in pain and an assault on moviegoers’ senses. The film takes its principal figure, the 1974 World Trade Center tightrope-walker Philippe Petit and caricatures him as an impish French irritant, replete with Gallic stereotypes.  I hadn’t seen James Marsh’s documentary “Man On Wire” (available on Netflix), but “Wire” or no “Wire” Robert Zemeckis’ drama is an exercise in high-wire torture.  (Worse -- and to insulting and pretentious effect -- this poor, overwrought film is dedicated to those who lost their lives in the New York City’s Twin Towers in 2001.)

The first hour of torture is the sound of grown men screaming at each other: shrill, screechy, angry, petulant men.  Some of those men fall off ropes from varying heights.  Some of those men aren’t happy unless they are shouting. “The Walk”, based on Mr. Petit’s autobiography, is a walk of misery and miserable men.  Make that miserable billy goats, braying and beating their hollow chests, or stripping down naked for attention.  The lone woman in this film, Annie (Charlotte Le Bon), doesn’t deserve such shallow, fragile company.  Nor did I.  Nor will you, I suspect.  

Everybody is miserable or mean in this movie, except Annie.  That the film is in 3D only compounded the torture and misery. The needless 3D only reinforced the emptiness of “The Walk”.

The misanthropic male misery is taken out on the audience by having paying moviegoers endure at least 20 climatic minutes of stomach-turning, sweaty-palm hijinks that are more mean-spirited, cruel and spiteful than thrilling and exhilarating.  We (or presumably some in the audience) already know that Petit triumphed, so why display all of this anger and prolonged agony, and Petit’s bloody feet, and his foot being impaled by a nail? Why? He ain’t Jesus.

In his on-camera confessionals an idealistic Petit emits a sanguine, grace and aspirational zeal. The director wants us to love him but Petit’s tantrums to his cohorts wear thin. Based on the film itself I was unsure whether Mr. Zemeckis genuinely liked Petit or hated him.  Looking back I think the director had as much contempt for him as I ended up having for his movie.  "The Walk" has contempt for us all. When Petit eventually thanks his girlfriend for everything I thought to myself, “thanks for what? She didn’t even have any input as a character, thanks to the film’s male writers!”

When you juxtapose the spiky first-hour banshee banter by Petit (forced French rapport by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) with phony staging of Petit perched on Lady Liberty with a golden image of the old World Trade Center towers behind him you come to realize — or at least I did — that the image and contrast is as empty and pretentious as the film istself.  It’s an insult to pretend that you are paying tribute to a pre-9/11/2001 America by parading a man who for some was seen as defacing the Twin Towers with his walk, defacing towers that some remarked represented something ugly and unlikable when they were first erected.

Mr. Zemeckis wants the opportunistic Philippe Petit to be the immigrant who loves America and its potential.  After all, Petit pays homage to America with his Liberty stand. His triumph of “making it in America” is symbolized by his literal and metaphoric hire-risk wire walk across a cultural bridge between two countries. But the director portrays his subject as an enfant terrible, some kind of weasely, spoiled ingrate.

In “The Walk” Petit is a pithy opportunist, an exploiter and manipulator of America and the iconography of the American image.  He seeks to belong, and breaks the rules to gain entry into an America where rules are historically broken.  Petit is akin to a trivial, harmless, small-scale edition of an invasive colonialist who trampled on Native Americans so violently. 

The film’s not-so-coincidental allegory to President Richard Nixon and his August 8, 1974 resignation announcement — and Petit’s calculated timing of his own daredevil feat two days earlier— left me the spectre of big crook-little crook, with the aptly-named Petit perhaps trying to measure up in a Napoleonic way to the-then Crook-In-Chief.  Nothing quite fits in "The Walk", and it is discordant throughout along with a con artist feel.  I felt conned.

Overall "The Walk" is smoke and mirrors, like an irritating magic trick that grows old and loses its sense of magic and lustre after its second tryout.  When you see the trick you feel as if you're being played rather than enthralled.  That's how I felt throughout "The Walk".  Petit tramples Mr. Zemeckis’s idea of a supposedly cherished American symbol in the Twin Towers, and the director in turn tramples us with hollowness and his lead character's (and perhaps the director's) barely-veiled cynicism and bitter fury.

Also with: Ben Kingsley, James Badge Dale, Clement Sibomy, Cesar Domboy.


“The Walk” is rated PG by the Motion Picture Association Of America for thematic elements involving perilous situations, and for some nudity, language, brief drug references and smoking.  The film is in English and French with English subtitles. The film’s running time is two hours and three minutes.

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