Director	James Marsh
Length	90 mins
Certificate	12A
Rating	Film making: 4  Personal enjoyment: 4

The tagline to Man on Wire reads “1974. 1350 feet up. The artistic crime of the century”. The crime in question was when French tightrope walker Phillipe Petit and his friends broke into the Twin Towers in New York and connected a wire between the two skyscrapers so that Petite could perform his routine high above the city. This film documents this event and the life of Petit leading up to it.

The film itself can essentially be divided into two parallel narratives: one is more obvious and straightforward, framing Phillipe’s story and the tightrope walk in the terms of a crime caper; the second is more abstract, concerning itself with the power of dreams, beauty and shared destiny. That the tagline foregrounds the heist reflects the film’s greater focus on this aspect of the story. Characters are introduced with black and white freeze frames not dissimilar from, say, Guy Richie’s Snatch (2000), and the narrative jumps back and forth in time like a Quentin Tarantino movie, breaking off when characters are in danger of being caught in order to create suspense, or to explain more of the backstory. This narrative device does succeed in creating tension and excitement - which is admirable since many in the audience already know how the real life story turns out - but there is a point around two thirds of the way into the film where the lighthearted, boy’s-own adventure tone becomes slightly bogged down in details, and it begins to feel as if there are things hinted at earlier in the film that are bigger and more important, and which are being neglected.

What is being neglected is the second narrative. Here the story goes deeper, delving into what motivates Petit into taking on such risky stunts, dissecting his crucial relationships between him and his girlfriend, and with his best friend on whom he depends for the rigging of the wires on which he performs. The film is at is best when it deals with these relationships, as it does in the earlier parts of the film, and brilliantly again in its conclusion. What sets these sections of the movie apart is that, while the intricacies of how the stunt was pulled off rely on long, wordy, exposition by those involved, these more poignant elements of the film are subtly revealed through the eerie beauty of the pictures and footage of Petit on his wire, by the affecting score, through the faces and emotion on the faces of the characters as they recall seeing it, and through the implied knowledge of what will happen to the Twin Towers themselves twenty seven years later.

The most telling result of the contrast between the relative success of the two narrative focuses is that, despite the time spent on the heist element of the story, we are still finally left with questions. When it comes to the film’s spiritual and emotional resonances, by sticking to the adage of show rather than tell, the film manages subtly to make us understand and feel the strange and abstract forces that tied the characters together and drove them to undertake this remarkable feat. It is only a shame that the film could not give more time to this, showing its characters as complex human beings, and less time packaging them as thrill seeking daredevils.