NEARLY seven years after 9/11, it’s ironic, and oddly comforting, that the criminal most closely associated with the World Trade Center is arguably a French tightrope walker who inched his way between the towers more than 1,300 feet in the air.
Philip Petit was arrested for his 1974 feat and still describes himself as a criminal, but was sentenced to community service – a walk over Belvedere Lake in Central Park.
He was a huge celebrity, a hero, and the Port Authority, which owned the towers, considered his walk a publicity coup for a pair of enormous, ugly buildings that had trouble attracting tenants.
Petit is the subject of James Marsh’s engrossing and exhilarating documentary “Man on Wire,” which uses vintage footage, interviews and re-creations.
It tells the still amazing and often thrilling story of how Petit and his confederates spent months casing the towers and smuggled a ton of equipment necessary for his walk to the top under the noses of guards.
Petit, who performed earlier, unauthorized walks on wire cables at Paris’ Notre Dame and the Sydney Harbor Bridge in Australia, became obsessed with the towers after reading a newspaper article about their construction.
With single-minded determination over 6½ years, Petit practiced and assembled a motley band of conspirators – including an assistant director for the New York State Department of Insurance, who helped with phony IDs – to accomplish the feat even before the towers opened to the public.
Marsh assembles a colorful group of talking heads, including the still self-dramatizing Petit himself. There’s also Petit’s then girlfriend Annie Allix, who feared Petit would be killed by the dangerous stunt; and Jean-Louis Blondeau, a photographer and close associate who shot an arrow between the roofs of the two towers so a wire could be strung between them.
Inevitably, this is also the story of 1970s New York City, which was transfixed by Petit’s feat and where many officials actually applauded an activity that would be met with outrage and lengthy jail sentences today.
“Man on Wire,” quite appropriately, barely refers to those later, evil criminals who demolished the World Trade Center, killing thousands of occupants.
“I was shocked,” Petit says of watching the towers fall in 2001. “I felt something alive was pulled out from me.”
MAN ON WIRE
Outstanding documentary.
Running time: 94 minutes. Rated PG-13 (profanity). At the Lincoln Plaza and the Sunshine.