James Marsh's documentary Man on Wire may not be the best movie in the Tribeca Film Festival--it feels a little drawn-out at 94 minutes, and it includes "dramatic reconstructions" that, mixed in with home movies and news footage, create confusion about whether what we're seeing is real or staged--but it's easy to see why it belongs in the Tribeca Film Festival. As everyone knows, the festival was created in the wake of, and as a response to, the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and the movie is about one of the few moments in the WTC's history that can only be called likable: the day of August 7, 1974, when Philippe Petit, a self-taught wire walker and master of other carny skills, such as picking pockets, managed to hang a wire between the two towers and perform on it, some 1300 feet above the ground. Interviewed in the movie along with his various accomplices, Petit, who couldn't be more elfinly French if he were played by Dominique Pinon, says that he knew that he had to do it when he first learned of the WTC's construction, years before the buildings were finished; while he was working the kinks out of his plan, he warmed up by performing similar illegal wire walks above Notre Dame Cathedral and Australia's Sydney Harbour Bridge.
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