Review: Philippe Petit at the Twin Towers, redux

Robert Zemeckis is trying something beautiful, and perhaps impossible, in The Walk: to reclaim the Twin Towers, taking the World Trade Center edifices back from the nightmarish taint of terrorism, the trauma of 9/11, and celebrating human ambition, and folly, in the process. By bringing his visual mastery to bear on the story of Philippe Petit, the French daredevil who, in the summer of 1974, crossed the 140 feet between the New York skyscrapers, balancing on a cable 1,350 feet in the air, Zemeckis pulls off not only a dazzling optical illusion, but a historical illusion, too.

Opening Wednesday in IMAX theaters and in wider release Oct. 9, The Walk feels like one of those '50s Hollywood spectacles - Around the World in 80 Days, say - only hyper-enhanced with cutting-edge digital and 3D technology. To be sure, this is a movie worth the extra bucks to experience in its giant stereoscopic format: the wheeling bird's-eye views, the exhilarating sensation of edging along the taut wire as Petit does, the clouds, and crowds below.

It's also a movie in which the characters, albeit based on real-life figures, are anything but. As played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, speaking with zee French accent and zee showy flair of a street performer, Petit is more of a cartoon than the titular lapin of Zemeckis' groundbreaking animation/live-action fusion, Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Jauntily positioned atop another New York landmark, the Statue of Liberty, Gordon-Levitt's Petit addresses the audience, narrating his own story, flashing back to his childhood (magical circus performers, narrow-minded parentals), his apprenticeship with a Czech trapeze artist (Ben Kingsley), and Petit's meet-cute with a fetching sidewalk busker, Annie (Charlotte Le Bon), who later accompanied him to New York.

The Paris that Zemeckis and his FX team have dreamed up, with its cute cars and cafes, has the cue-the-extras backlot ambience of a vintage MGM musical. When Petit and Annie pack their bags and head for the Big Apple, that city, too, looks sprung from the pages of a pop-up picture book: the sun-burnished brownstones, the bustling avenues, the gruff but amenable construction workers, pushing to finish the towers upon which Petit is plotting his "coup."

For a more realistic - and, in fact, more suspenseful - account of Petit's majestically loony and decidedly illegal stunt and the elaborate plans it necessitated, James Marsh's 2008 Oscar-winning documentary, Man on Wire, is the film to see. (Marsh's reenactments play like a great noir heist pic.) But as The Walk similarly makes clear, Petit's death-defying high-wire act required complicated logistics and the recruitment of a team of confederates to facilitate the daunting challenge of getting a 400-pound cable up the elevators to the rooftop of one tower and then somehow flung across and secured to the other. Without detection. It was a stealth operation to make a Navy SEAL team proud.

Of course, Petit, in his cat burglar getup, did triumph on that August day. As a celebration of agility, ability, and outlandish human behavior, The Walk is a winning thing. It may not get inside the head of its pole-balancing protagonist - it doesn't really even try - but Zemeckis' movie takes you skyward.

The Walk *** (Out of four stars)

Directed by Robert Zemeckis. With Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ben Kingsley,

and Charlotte Le Bon. Distributed by Tristar/Sony Pictures.

Running time: 2 hours, 3 mins.

Parent's guide: PG (profanity, adult themes).

Playing at: Imax theaters only; in wider release beginning Oct. 9.

srea@phillynews.com

215-854-5629@Steven_Rea