Man on Wire 偷天鋼索人

Just as Kong humanized that milestone piece of architecture, Petit did this one. Many New Yorkers thought the World Trade Center too stark, even arrogant; Petit revealed its capacity for poetry. And the director of "Man on Wire," James Marsh, through close collaboration with Petit, makes us experience the towers as if they were natural phenomena, like the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls. When the wind whips through them, it's as if a Tolkien giant has been breathing deeply. Yet there is Philippe smiling mischievously, graceful as the Silver Surfer and defiant as Mick Jagger.

This movie about Petit's achievement is a gust of fresh air, offering the inner workings of a lark that put a man's life at risk -- and also made him immortal. It not only brings the World Trade Center back to life in all its glory, but summons a pre-Iraq War America and a pre-Giuliani New York City, a country and a city of anarchic highs and lows, where citizens felt anything could happen.

Petit celebrates the World Trade Center in his walk, but he also subverts it as a symbol of corporate power. It becomes his play space in the sky, and his gift to the citizens who gaze at it starry-eyed, for free.

A favorite saying of journalists and politicians is, "You don't want to see how the sausage is made." Marsh's movie says you do want to see how a miracle is made, even if the details can be just as unsavory.

It quickly sketches Petit's earlier feats of walking between the spires of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and the northern pylons of Sydney Harbor Bridge in Australia. Although he obviously adores the limelight, he sickens of the controversy; if he's going to run up against (to his mind) petty authorities, he might as well set his sights sky-high.

And the way Marsh tells the story (from Petit's own memoir, "To Reach the Clouds"), he saw the World Trade Center as his crowning achievement from the moment news of its design hit Europe in 1968.

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