Man on Wire 偷天鋼索人

It helps "Man On Wire" as comedy-drama that his American friends are quirky or unreliable or earthbound -- even a New York street performer loyal to Petit is spooked by his ambition. The most useful Yank might be their inside man at the World Trade Center, helping them counterfeit papers, lending them his phone number, giving them a place to go before their final ascent -- and, for American audiences, bringing back the early 1970s simply with the extravagance of his moustache.

Marsh is one of the few directors who knows that on film, poetry must have sturdy bearings. He gives "Man on Wire" a heck of a launch pad, dramatizing the choices Petit and his crew made, their misfires, their ingenuity, the way friendship and love waxes and wanes yet re-ignites again for a moment of glory. The only concrete question he completely ignores is how Petit paid for the enterprise; in an interview Marsh said he had planned to film an explanatory sequence in which the world's greatest juggler, a German, gave Philippe a suitcase full of deutsche marks.

If any sequence had to be sacrificed for the budget, Marsh was right to choose that one. The movie is about how a vision nurtured on a shoestring and in the dark can bloom into grandeur. It overflows with emotion, but in an unsentimental and Gallic way; things change abruptly for everyone in the story.

Petit poured everything of himself and of his group's belief in him into his conquest of the tallest buildings on Earth. They shared in his moment of transcendence -- and thanks to Marsh, now we can, too.

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