Robert Zemeckis’ The Walk is a spectacle, certainly, when Philippe Petit (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a wire-walker with one hell of a dream, balances across the Twin Towers with a gymnast’s finesse. Gordon-Levitt does well when he’s not speaking: his eyes focused, his gait measured with a ruler’s precision, his walk choreographed to pin-point perfection. The cinematography matches his dexterous performance, where – as Petit explains – we feel like interlopers floating in the clouds where we do not belong. Gordon-Levitt plays him like an incandescent Buddha on the tight-rope, the mélange of steel, concrete and iron that is New York City illuminated by his enlightened walk, where – as the mythology goes – he breathes life into the Twin Towers.
Yet the elements
Zemeckis blends into the film itself feel so trite and overcooked that what
comes out is not an adrenaline-pumping pleasure ride but a simmering assurance that –
despite the obvious danger – nothing bad
is going to happen. The narration – oh, the narration – is delivered with such
gusto, one might think they were watching Fred Astaire’s mailman in Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town. Zemeckis has no faith in his audience, so he provides us
with a suave and omniscient Joseph Gordon-Levitt to blunt the more suspenseful edges of the movie. The main problem with the narration is the way it interrupts Zemeckis’ tour-de-force of a sequence, forcefully removing us from the experience. In his
desire for cohesion, the director undercuts what he does right.
He never even
fully decides on the perspective he wants to take with his protagonist,
painting the idiosyncratic man too broadly. We get a selfish and paranoid Petit, a stubborn and ruthless
Petit, a gentle and kind Petit, a pedantic and annoying Petit – but we never get past the caricature of feeling within Gordon-Levitt’s performance. Given what works – the cinematography (when it's not
eerily in-depth) and the visual architecture of the film – and the potential of
drawing out a fascinating character study, The
Walk makes some dastardly mistakes, unfortunately lending itself to obvious
satire in its attempts to give Petit a soul. At one moment, he takes the boots off his skittish colleague, Jeff, 100 stories high in the tower shaft – it's played romantically, and I can’t
really tell you why that scene is there, except to portray Petit with a
Janus-faced charisma. The mood shifts, at best, are puzzling; at worst, incredulous.
The tone of the
film itself veers from caper-film, to biopic, to 3-D visual spectacle a la Gravity. The characters' scheming feels like
Zemeckis’ idea of delivering an entertaining film. Yawn. No thanks. The life
details are nearly irrelevant, more stocking-stuffer than anything else. What
isn't visually charming is either corny or bland.
The Walk is abundant with over-ripe sentimentality and
one-dimensional characters. Ben Kingsley plays Petit's mentor, Papa Rudy; essentially, he's a cutout of Ben
Kingsley Playing A Czech. (Boy, was he touched when he read the New York Times
and saw his former student had accomplished the impossible feat!) Winona
Ryder look-alike Charlotte Le Bon is restricted to playing the movie's one, laughably thin female character, barely registering in any capacity except as a
cheerleader with binoculars, hailing the crowds to watch her fabulous
boyfriend Petit. There’s nothing to make fun of but the material itself (“I’m going
to go follow my dreams”), as it seems extracted from a competently-acted Disney sitcom (if such a thing exists). Not
only do the emotional moments fail to land, but Zemeckis indicates that none of it matters by refusing to zero-in on human dynamics.
Conceptually,
the movie is a disaster. Philippe Petit put his life on the line for what he
believed would be the artistic “coup” of the century – such an idea deserves a
more ambitious interpretation, or at least more structural awareness. Instead
we get a bowl of tasteless oatmeal, sugarless and a little too milky.
But we do have him
balancing for his life on the uncertain wires: confident, meditative
and at peace with what he calls “the abyss.” It's suspenseful and riveting
imagery, reliant mainly on the subtlety of Gordon-Levitt’s physical performance and the depth of scope that Zemeckis’ team
provides. If the rest of the film had been imbued with higher emotional stakes, perhaps it would not have been overburdened by sentimental clunk.
Then again, we're talking about the guy who directed Forest Gump.
Grade: C+