Every American mourns 9/11 in their own way, but Robert Zemeckis’s The Walk is aggravating because it pretends to honor the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center as symbols of hope, ambition, and roguish individual will but offers only a cutesy thrill ride.
Zemeckis uses the story of French acrobat and street mime Philippe Petit, who in 1974 strung a tightrope cable between the Towers and walked from one to the other, as a testament to political defiance and personal courage — but not our own. Something about this concept doesn’t quite gel.
Zemeckis cossets those who blanch at patriotic tributes yet he beats the drum for Petit’s can-do bluster and single-minded pride, posing Petit as an honorary (immigrant) American demonstrating the same Western traits that the 9/11 terrorists envied, hated, and, in their evil way, imitated.
This stunt creates an ideological trap for Zemeckis; simply being non-nationalistic doesn’t help. The Walk’s too-circumspect, melancholic cheer — connected to a now-vanished totem of American engineering — is no better than shameless, vulgar rabble-rousing.
At first, the image of Petit (played by former child star Joseph Gordon-Levitt) perched in the Statue of Liberty’s torch, gazing upon a lost, reimagined vista of the New York City skyline generates a pang: The Twin Towers are seen standing in a cerulean mist. It brings back unbidden memories — and immediately softens them. Petit is memorializing in our place, and Zemeckis is telling us how to feel. No doubt some viewers won’t mind this button-pushing, but as one who was unimpressed by Man on Wire, the 2007 documentary about Petit’s exploit, I find this celebration of him overscaled. And Zemeckis’s unfortunate over-fondness for F/X manipulation doesn’t help.
Before Zemeckis discovered 3D, he and writing partner Bob Gale made Back to the Future, maybe the best American comedy of the 1980s (they also collaborated on the irresistible modern folktale farces I Wanna Hold Your Hand, 1941, and Used Cars). Going solo, Zemeckis’s infatuation with gimmickry was at the heart of Forest Gump’s featherweight political history, then went further out of whack with one F/X boondoggle after another, getting increasingly extravagant, mixing fantasy with sentimental drama. (His previous film, Flight, with Denzel Washington, was an unholy mix of The Lost Weekend and The Poseidon Adventure; it got its ultimate critique from Seth MacFarlane’s Oscar ceremony parody that depicted tough-talking sock puppets tumbling in a clothes dryer.)
#share#The high-wire vertigo scenes in The Walk are a carny attraction that cheapens the 9/11 association. After Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s glowing, daydream Americana in The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet, Zemeckis’s special effects feel hollow; his screen’s expanse seems to shrink, making one aware of its boundaries — 3D pretense shows Zemeckis’ philosophical vacuum. His Twin Towers mirage lacks the authority of the distanced silhouette that appears harrowingly at the end of Spielberg’s Munich, simultaneously a forecast and a remembrance of the skyscrapers’ political resonance and spiritual evocation.
As Petit, Gordon-Levitt adds charmlessness to Petit’s unlikable zeal, and the backstory of his Parisian apprenticeship with veteran acrobat Papa Rudy (Ben Kingsley) gets mushy. He rounds up a group of equally unpleasant cohorts for his grand “coup,” including indistinct love-interest Annie (Charlotte LeBon, who you’d never guess captured legendary fashion muse Victoire Doutreleau in the film Yves Saint Laurent).
Except for the opportunity Petit affords Zemeckis to massage our wounds, Petit is the wrong figure on whom to focus a 9/11 memorial; his egotism distracts from the self-examination that might provide true catharsis. Petit’s refusal to be mournful is phony uplift. Oliver Stone got it right in World Trade Center when Nicolas Cage’s stubborn, self-sacrificing Port Authority cop confessed “I don’t smile a lot. That’s why I never made lieutenant. People don’t like me because I don’t smile a lot.” When Annie assures Petit that he “gave [the Towers] soul,” it’s gimmicky Zemeckis smiling too much — at his own “heartfelt” cleverness.
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For a while it looked like there was hope for Ridley Scott’s The Martian. The story of an American astronaut, Mark Watney (Matt Damon), who uses his botany skills to survive once he is stranded on the red planet after his crew takes off, unexpectedly features a trove of buoyant and propulsive disco tunes that a fellow crew member left behind. This seemed wonderfully ironic of Scott. The importuning of disco, a musical subculture that won over the world, linked to NASA’s multimillion-dollar technological effort is more persuasive about ingenuity and fortitude than The Walk. Disco music has enough Hi-NRG (as it was once described by pop critics) to rocket a scientist’s soul back home. Thelma Houston’s “Don’t Leave Me This Way” enlivens Watney’s intellectual fortitude.
#related#But then David Bowie’s “Starman” intervenes. Suddenly, Scott’s opportunism is unmistakable; he shows no feel for music or American cultural endeavor. The songs are just more product placement by this ultimate ad man; he calculates placating rockist disco snobs through a literal-minded space opera rather than poetic musical consistency. Scott’s extravagant, hackneyed approach to genre overtakes The Martian’s drawn-out narrative. As Watney struggles, his crewmates atone, NASA watches, China lends a hand, and a diverse gathering of Earth-bound well-wishers wish each other well, the pile-up of clichés reminded me that all this has been seen and done before:
Gregory Peck, Gene Hackman, James Franciscus, Richard Crenna, and Lee Grant were more relatable at it in John Sturges’s conventional but effective Marooned. James Caan’s stranded yet ecstatic astronaut in Robert Altman’s Countdown was the purest expression of space-age aspiration. The distress metaphor was singlehandedly accomplished by Sandra Bullock in Gravity and Robert Redford in All Is Lost. Watney’s crew captain Jessica Chastain just endured a similar predicament in Interstellar. Best of all, Brian DePalma turned the dilemma into visual poetry with Mission to Mars (2000). It owed little to Kubrick’s 2001; instead it boasted DePalma’s exquisite languor, tension, and humor. Mission to Mars leapt beyond death to spiritual evolution in vibrant sci-fi hues. The ultimate disappointment of The Martian is Scott’s lackluster post-Alien style. He can’t disguise his detachment. Without highly aesthetic imagery, Scott’s just a low-NRG J. J. Abrams.