Man on Wire Buy Now

Man on Wire (James Marsh, 2008)

I've been reading commentary about Man on Wire in the weeks since I watched it, and what most surprises me is the number of people who don't get it. It seems obvious to me, because it's a very basic thing; unlike most documentaries, which make no apology for being documentaries, Man on Wire is structured like a suspense film. It's a documentary that doesn't play like a documentary, and there seems to be no recognition of this among those who don't get it. (Of course, that may mean Marsh did his job all too well; the people who don't get it may have actually thought they were watching a suspense film, in which case, it is awfully slow.) If they do get it, and still don't like the movie, well, more power to them. I can understand that. It just depresses me when something so different is treated like something that's the same.

Man on Wire is the story of French tightrope walker Phillipe Petit's greatest achievement: tightrope walking between the still-under-construction Twin Towers in the early 1970s. For some reason, I always assumed that this had been sanctioned, so I was fascinated by the planning it took to do all this (a good chunk of the middle third of the movie reminded me of a number of bank heist films I've seen over the years). Necessarily, a lot of the description of how the thing was pulled off required a lot of re-enactment, and I've read where that turned some people off. But really, did you want even more head shots of people sitting around and talking? We already got a lot of those. Besides, there's a studied (and, I'm sure, conscious) cheesiness to the re-enactment scenes that put me in mind of Spike Jonze's video for the Beastie Boys song "Sabotage", and that can never be a bad thing. Fake mustaches!

No, it isn't an actual suspense film. It's still a movie that's going to go at the speed of documentary (and I mean actual documentary here, rather than the recent flood of "agitprop masquerading as documentary", viz. Michael Moore or The Company or other such silliness). And yet it doesn't feel quite right to call it "documentary" in the same vein as something like Winged Migration or Hoop Dreams. If Hitchcock had made a documentary, it might look like this, and that is about the highest praise I can think of to heap on this movie's back. ****
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