The Walk makes a dizzying statement of artistic principle

%{[ data-embed-type=”image” data-embed-id=”57150ad889121ca96b91e11a” data-embed-element=”aside” ]}%

At the start of Robert Zemeckis’ The Walk, Joseph Gordon-Levitt — playing famous French wire-walker Philippe Petit — stands atop the Statue of Liberty, in front of the New York City skyline, and directly addresses the camera about the 1974 day that he walked between the towers of the World Trade Center: “They call to me … they stir something inside me!” (Imagine Gordon-Levitt saying all this in adorable French accent, by the way.)

That doesn’t really answer the “why” question central to Petit’s vocation, and here at the outset, a similar inquiry looms over Zemeckis’ latest (which arrives this week in IMAX and next week everywhere else). Why make a movie about this event when there’s already a perfectly good, Oscar-winning documentary about it called Man on Wire?

The answers to both lie in the film’s flashback structure. As Gordon-Levitt’s Petit narrates his life, we see his start as a unicycle-riding street troubadour in Paris, doing magic tricks, stunts and other acts for money. An unexpected trip to a dentist’s office leads him to read a magazine article about the World Trade Center, then under construction. Voila! Ze toothache, it iz cured! He imagines himself walking between the towers on a wire — an impossible dream but one that nevertheless begins to drive him.

Throughout, Zemeckis uses the over-the-top language of the CGI blockbuster — scenes morphing into one another, the camera fluidly jumping from closeup to wide angle in that heightened, Spielbergian way — and a more classically playful approach, with Petit’s garrulous, camera-facing narration suggesting Gigi or Pinocchio. Zemeckis’ approach to 3-D also feels like a combination of old and new. As a pioneer of the revamped technology, the director has probably forgotten more about 3-D than most other filmmakers know today, and he wields it magnificently. Rather than throw things at the camera (though he occasionally does that, too), he prefers to heighten chasmlike spaces and to play with turning foreground objects into background ones, and vice versa, as a way to draw us into the action. The whole movie is an immaculate diorama, an indulgence in artificiality: the accents, the playful use of color, the effects-filled montages, the stagy re-creations of Paris and New York. At times, The Walk seems to be about its very artificiality.

But on to the title event: Petit spends years assembling his team members, and they begin to imagine and engineer all that must go into making the walk a reality. How, for example, to stretch an extremely heavy wire from the roof of one tower to the other — and how to then keep it stable against winds at that altitude. Oh, and how to do all of this without getting arrested. Here, the film takes on the style of a heist picture, even as it maintains its fourth-wall-breaking playfulness. As one might imagine, the 3-D is nauseatingly good during the high-wire scenes; reports of vomiting moviegoers at the film’s premiere were not apocryphal. If you’re prone to vertigo, you should proceed with caution.

Zemeckis would have us believe that Petit isn’t just a daredevil but a man who followed a creative, ennobling impulse. “If it works, this will be the artistic coup of the 20th century,” we’re told. The walk was an assertion of individuality and creativity over impersonality and technology, and many believe that it helped humanize the towers for a city that had been skeptical of them. (One character actually comes out and says this, in just one example of The Walk‘s endearingly on-the-nose, old-fashioned dialogue.)

But Zemeckis’ film is another such assertion — partly an artistic apologia for the 3-D format but also a lament for a time when one could traipse through airport security with heavy rigging equipment and casually tell the agent that you were going to walk the sky between the World Trade Center’s towers. The events of 9/11 cast a shadow over The Walk, though they’re never mentioned. Yet the very fact that out of this shadow has come a gentle film, devoid of villainy, evil or violence — a film about a man walking on air where one day unthinkable horrors would unfold — feels like a declaration of artistry and humanity.