I didn't see it in 3D, though I'm sure it's one of those rare examples of nearly perfect delivery. But even flat on the big screen, The Walk is a dazzling visual rollercoaster. Helmed by visionary director Robert Zemeckis and cinematographer Dariusz Wolski (a personal favorite), this biographical drama takes its audience on a journey through light and space that rivals recent epics like Gravity and Life of Pi. Rivals, I should say, in vision; its drama leaves somewhat more to be desired.
The story is, of course, the famed walk of French high-wire artist Philippe Petit between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. Typical of Zemeckis's work, the climax literally swoops around the titular event in dizzying, vertigo-inducing images of beauty and tension. It is, simply put, one of the most impressive sequences on film last year. Perfectly balancing the various elements of camerawork, visual effects, and underlying score, the film crafts a dreamlike sequence that is equal parts fantasy and reality, allowing us inside the artist's head to appreciate the culmination of his young life's work.
The rest of the film is a strange mixture of comedy, drama, and slapstick that, together, form something that could be called a fairytale adventure. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is pitch-perfect as the little Petit (*chuckle*), breaking the fourth wall to narrate his own story. He fashions it as a dream -- compare if you will to Tom in The Glass Menagerie -- a specifically American dream that will bring meaning and accomplishment to his life. He leads us, perhaps a little to briskly, through his young life as an amateur juggler and wannabe circus performer, overcoming difficulties and failure through resourcefulness and determination. Gordon-Levitt brings incredible humor to the character, his eyes sparkling like diamonds and his manic antics prancing their way into our hearts. It's impossible not to like him, even when we probably, like his friends, want to slap him and tell him to get his head out of the clouds. He wears madness like a fashion, and it's catching.
There's not much more to say. As a drama, I'd say it's particularly weak in breadth and depth. As a coming-of-age fantasy adventure, it's breathtakingly effective. The film suggests more than it explores, a risky gamble that I'm not sure it won. But it makes one suggestion repeatedly that I think hints at Zemeckis's true feelings about the material: the images of the Twin Towers are so beautiful and, no doubt, laboriously perfected, that the film feels rather like an homage to their memory. In many ways, both before and after September 11, 2001, the towers represented a form of the American identity and dream, and in repeating their image -- bathed in sunlight or starlight, rising against the cityscape, swaddled in ethereal clouds -- Zemeckis is saying a lot about the nature of our dreams and the lengths to which we go to achieve them. The final moments of the film are of Gordon-Levitt, perched atop Lady Liberty with the towers in the background, saying that Petit's daring walk won him a free pass to the observation decks from the manager, on which the expiration date had been crossed off and changed to "forever". As the sunlight reflects off the towers, the screen fades to black. That, I think, is where Zemeckis enshrined his true emotional climax.
IMDb: The Walk
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