Robert Zemeckis’s new film, The Walk, opens with Joseph Gordon Levitt staring at the camera in a distracting wig and asking, in a French accent, “Why?” It’s a good question, and one I asked myself often after learning of the project. (More specifically, I wailed it like I was Nancy Kerrigan being struck by a pipe shaped like Zemeckis.)
Why? Why turn a cultural artifact as perfect as Man On Wire, the Oscar-winning 2008 documentary, into a scripted film that tells the exact same story? Why cast 34-year-old American Joseph Gordon Levitt as 24-year-old French man Philippe Petit? Why make this movie at all? The answer, it turns out, is because a lot of it is just magical.
The Walk isn’t a complete biopic of Philippe Petit, but a chronicle of the planning and execution of his most impressive feat: a 45-minute high-wire walk between the World Trade Center towers in August of 1974. After a brief introduction—JGL’s Petit narrates the entire film while standing on the Statue of Liberty’s torch, for some reason—the film jumps to roughly six years before his walk in a distractingly soundstagey version of Paris. (They filmed the whole thing in Montreal for tax reasons, because that’s what people do now.)