Man On Wire

There's two ways you can view this film. In part, it is certainly a very
interesting documentary about the occasion when a maverick French wirewalker,
and his mates, broke into the World Trade Center, slung a cable between the two
towers, and had him walk across it.

On another level, it's a documentary about some fantastically smug and
self-satified people who did the above in 1974, and have been dining out on the
story every since. I'd hate to actually know Philippe Petit, he's probably a
dreadful person to be stuck next to at a dinner party, Mastermind specialist
subject: Myself and How Clever I Am.

Essentially, it's not an uninteresting tale by any means, but there's two
problems. One, it's overlong. A bit of judicious editing would make this a
bloody good 45 minute BBC documentary. At double that, it begins to pall. Two,
there's not enough source material. Part of the reason for this is obvious;
there is, tragically, no way of revisiting the scene, and saying "yes, this is
where we attached the cables" or similar. Fortunately, taste prevails and we
don't travel to NY to mawkishly paw over ground zero, but that leaves us
essentially with archive footage and talking heads, and the archive material
really isn't that good. It would seem that their exploits were filmed at the
time with a few cine cameras and still cameras, but not with anything like the
professionalism you'd like. There's a lot of distant blurs of what might be a
man, on what is possibly a wire. Likewise, there's just too much of Petit and
his team banging on about their recollections of the event, and that's what
makes them look smug; if they'd said how clever they were just the once, you'd
have accepted it.

With more material to work from, this might have been worth 90 minutes of our
time. Cutting their coat according to their cloth, they'd have ended up with a
45 minute documentary. What we end up with, to quote Bilbo Baggins, is butter
scraped across too much bread.