The Walk **** (2015, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Charlotte Le Bon, Ben Kingsley) – Movie Review

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is in pole position. Come in Monsieur Petit, your time is up!

Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars as French high-wire artist Philippe Petit, who in 1974 recruits a team to help him realize his crazy dream of walking across Manhattan’s World Trade Center towers. Fake French accent apart, Gordon-Levitt is magnificent as Petit. No one could be better. He’s probably just a foot off the ground when he does his wire walks, but it still looks brilliantly clever and cool. He looks like a small boy tackling a monster: it’s David from Paris versus the Goliath of the Towers.

This movie is what 3D and CGI are for. At last a proper reason for them, and director Robert Zemeckis turns them into an art form. I know it’s only a movie, and I’ve got heavy 3D specs on, but I ducked a couple of times when stuff came out of the screen at me. I don’t remember feeling that before with 3D.

It’s always been just a fun gimmick, now an increasingly wearing, wearying gimmick. A film as posh and successful as The Martian is completely unnecessary in 3D: there’s a sense in which it actually gets in the way of Ridley Scott’s images. Here, that’s certainly not so: 3D and CGI triumph. The long sequence of the towers crossing is a queasy experience. It’s a reminder that we are wired to be height-phobic. I feel queasy with a huge surge of vertigo. What other films make you feel something like this?

That’s the technology, but the drama is also well taken care of in Zemeckis’s and Christopher Browne’s screenplay, based on Petit’s book To Reach the Clouds. And the acting too. Charlotte Le Bon as Annie Allix, James Badge Dale as Jean-Pierre, Ben Schwartz as Albert, Benedict Samuel as Jean-Louis and Steve Valentine as Barry Greenhouse.

It’s a smallish cast, and they are all good. Ben Kingsley slices the ham as is his current modus, for example see him as Louis B Mayer in Life, but his florid performance as kindly and helpful old trapezist Papa Rudy adds eccentric colour and it kind of works.

The story is quite well known, but not by everybody, so no spoilers. It had me on the edge of my seat once the World Trade Center towers sequence starts, playing like a riveting thriller. And before that in Paris (and up the Statue of Liberty) it plays like a delightful Jean-Pierre Jeunet magical realism movie. It all works, works together, and works magnificently. It’s a haunting, lovely movie, one of those you want to see again immediately.

Really enjoyed The Walk – it’s so tense, haunting and brilliantly done.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Movie Review

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