Poetic Heights

When the police asked Philippe Petit why he strung a tightrope between the World Trade Center towers and danced back and forth on it for 45 minutes, he told them, "There is no 'why.'" But the documentary I saw yesterday, "Man on Wire," has a lot of fun explaining the how—it's very much a fun caper flick—and winds up with a moving sense of the purposeless poetry of the thing. Petit himself is a fascinating character, and as the film goes on you get a sense of awe not just at the act itself but at the six years of obsessive planning and work involved in pulling it off. And you believe Petit when he talks about the moment of hesitation before he stepped off the roof and onto the wire, a quarter-mile over the concrete below. "Death is very close," he says.

But the part that's even more moving is when his friend Jean-Louis Blondeau, a key helper in the project, talks about the moment when Petit became acclimated and relaxed, and started smiling and enjoying himself. Blondeau's eyes fill, and his voice cracks. Petit's then-girlfriend Annie Allix, who was watching from the ground, is similarly emotional, remembering it more than three decades afterward. I came away thinking that for Petit, the act was personal, particular, the outcome of one person's obsession. Who else in the world would ever have thought of such a thing, much less have done it? But for Blondeau, Allix, and the rest of us awed spectators, the walk that morning said something about human beings in general. When someone accomplishes a daring feat—climbing Everest for the first time, or flying solo across the Atlantic—don't we all, including my own timid self, feel somehow a little enlarged, a little raised up as well? But that morning in 1974 was something special—superhuman determination and concentration, yes, but in the service of wit and charm, whimsy and grace. People do awful things in  this world, but my god, some of us do wonderful things too, and I really can't think of anything more artistically wonderful than what Philippe Petit did that morning. Death was close, but life and art and beauty were even closer. Go see the film; it'll do you good.