The Walk: Go for those oh-so-crazy 25 minutes

The walk

Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ben Kingsley, Charlotte Le Bon, James Badge Dale

Rated: 8/10

When a 25-year-old French juggler Phillipe Petit did a death defying, 45-minute illegal aerial walk on a sheer cable tied between the terraces of the Twin Towers, 1,400 feet above the ground, the entire world stopped and gaped.

It being the 70s, YouTube was entirely unborn and all these four-and-a-half decades later can only show still pictures of the event. So when, writer-director Robert Zemeckis decided to depict this cloud-kissing, immortal moment in history in a full length feature film, it was sure to make the world gape too.

That he skillfully manages to do so, all those 42 years later, and much after the World Trade Centre went down to a terror attack that tore the social harmony of the world forever, is a feat no less than the actual walk itself.

If ever there could be nausea in the knees, and if ever your legs could turn so completely jelly, it is in the last 20-25 minutes of the film when Phillipe, played to the book by French actor Gordon Levit, walks on that electric cable, balancing an iron rod in the hand and there being nothing but 1,400 feet of death under his feet. He walks, he spins, he sits, he lies down head up, he bows and he does everything humanly impossible as the applaud does from 1,400 feet below. And when he does all this, you are seized by the longest panic attack in the duration of mankind.

These unbelievable last 20 minutes of the film, however, get slowed down by the rest of the film that Zemeckis spends in showing how the master walker planned this illegal feat. It was for years, when he first saw the draft image of the Twin Towers in a magazine at a Parisian dental clinic. His childhood, his growing up years, his obsession with jugglery which later quantified into aerial rope walking, his performances on the streets of Paris and the lessons he takes from generational aerial walker Papa Rudy Omankowsky of the White Devils aerial troupe (played by an arresting Ben Kingsley), his affair with another street artiste Annie, his search of the “accomplices” for his impending “world coup” — all this takes away too much time and almost bogs down the actual event in the film.

But having said this, a 45-minute real aerial walk cannot take real time in a film and the director’s 20 minutes on the high strung rope are more than stunning. The computer imagery with which he has reconstructed the Twin Towers and the walk in the clouds itself is the heart and the soul of this film.

Believe me, those 20 minutes, executed to perfection by Zemeckis, more than make up for the slog before. Once Phillipe is on that cable, you gape, you hold your knees as they turn to jelly, you get vertigo (just imagine 20 long minutes of giddiness in your seat), you stop breathing and even when you close your eyes the sensations don’t leave you. It’s so scary because Zemeckis makes it so real. It was a rarest of rare moment though it may not be the rarest of rare film. 

Source: Sunday Pioneer, October 11, 2015