Man on Wire: THE WALK

The Walk opens on a question: Why? It tells the true story of Philippe Petit, a French tightrope walker who, in 1974, decided to string his high-wire between the towers of the newly built World Trade Center in New York City. The question is a natural response, and a reasonable place to start. Why risk death on a dangerous and illegal act of daredevil theatrics over 100 stories above the ground? To Petit, who fancies himself an artist, a death-defying poet of motion, it is do or do not. There is no why. It’s quickly apparent that neither the man nor the film can adequately articulate a response that’ll explain. They both leave it to the sheer beauty and wonder conjured up by the act itself to feel out an answer. He’s a dreamer who simply wants to surprise the world with something amazing, a fleeting moment of transcendence, because he believes he can. Why? No. Why not?

Think of the film as one sparkling feat of ingenious three-dimensional spectacle paying homage to another. Director Robert Zemeckis has made a career out of pushing special effects out on the high-wire of believability. He’s made time traveling characters doubling back on themselves (the Back to the Futures), cartoons interacting with real actors (Who Framed Roger Rabbit), grotesque slapstick maiming (Death Becomes Her), manipulated historical footage (Forrest Gump, Contact), scarily vivid plane crashes (Cast Away, Flight), and uncannily fluid motion capture worlds (The Polar Express, A Christmas Carol). Taking full advantage of what movies can do, he’s a master technician interested in telling classically developed narratives in popcorn cinema at the edge of what’s possible. So of course he’s committed to bringing to life the story of a man who saw the impossible and stepped out on the wire anyway.

Starting with a sharp close-up of Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s grinning face – it arcs out of the 3D frame with topographical specificity like Herzog’s cave paintings – The Walk’s first shot pulls back until we see he’s perched on the Statue of Liberty’s torch. Behind him glowing computer sunshine gleams off a perfect shiny CGI New York City skyline. It’s vintage in look and theatrical in presentation, utterly and perfectly unreal. Playing Petit gives Gordon-Levitt a chance to be larger than life, leaning into ebullient ringleader’s bravado. He plays a man who’s always putting on a show. How else could he convince not only himself, but a small group of accomplices as well, to plot a stunt that never stops looking insane to outside eyes? With an acrobat’s posture and a showman’s energy, he breaks the fourth wall, jauntily narrating his story like he’s telling a tall tale. Well, it’s certainly tall, and would definitely be hard to believe if it weren’t already proficiently chronicled in James Marsh’s 2008 documentary Man on Wire.

We watch as fluid, sparkling CGI and Dariusz Wolski’s gliding camera animate broad nostalgically filtered scenes of Petit’s early life. As a boy, a family of tightrope walkers performing in a circus near his small town fascinated him. He strung up some rope between two trees in his backyard and slowly learned to keep his balance. (It’s a fine allegory for any kid who knew early passion for an art.) Once grown, he trained with an expert (Ben Kingsley) before heading to Paris where he scraped by with money made from impromptu sidewalk shows. Eventually, he’s crossing small ponds, then the two peaks of the Notre Dame cathedral. But it’s seeing New York’s twin towers in a magazine that really ignites his imagination.

For most of its runtime after the introduction to Petit’s origins, the film – scripted by Zemeckis with Christopher Browne – is a thin, light, and functional heist movie, where all the reconnaissance, team-building, and scheming has a benign, maybe even noble, goal. The only thing they’re out to steal is a moment of bystanders’ attention, a moment to look up in awe at what one determined daredevil is capable of. He recruits his girlfriend (Charlotte Le Bon) to travel to New York with him. Two friends (Clément Sibony and César Domboy) join them, willing to help sneak the wire between the tops of the towers. Along the way they find some Americans (Steve Valentine, James Badge Dale, Ben Schwartz, and Benedict Samuel) who are willing to get involved in this daring scheme. There’s a simple pleasure in process during the planning stages as a brisk montage flows from Petit’s imagination out into the tricky real world of elevators, foreman, and security guards.

Often treading close to surface-level corniness – music booms and the camera swirls with sentimental reverence, while the ensemble trades likable banter – the movie is completely intertwined with Petit’s exuberant self-confidence. It builds in anticipation. How could a recreation of this impossible act possibly make the build-up pay off? There’s double-edged suspense, wondering if Petit will fall, and if the movie will. Then he steps off the edge of a tower onto a wire strung across the 200-foot gap 1,350 feet in the air. That’s a long way down. It’s terrifying and beautiful, intense feelings mixed in one transcendent breathless sequence. Zemeckis floats across the expanse with Gordon-Levitt in some of the most brilliantly realized heights I’ve ever seen on a movie screen. It’s worth the wait. Both the film and the stunt that inspired it are examples of people putting faith in the power of their skill and planning to pull off impressive amazement.

When Gordon-Levitt first stands at the very corner of the roof, wind blowing his hair as he wavers, holding his precarious balance, the effect is shockingly peaceful in its intensity. The movie climaxes with this dizzying, lovely sequence, as overwhelmingly tense and lovely as it should be to sell the majesty of the moment. It’s moving to see the characters nervous and astonished as Petit slowly maneuvers across the open air with no safety precaution to catch him. That’s also what provokes a tangibly physiological response. I’ve never been as lightheaded with vertigo while sitting in a theater—palms sweating, teeth clenching, stomach fluttering. Not since Scorsese’s Hugo has a big studio production used 3D so well. Here it captures not only the scale of the stunt, and the danger below, but the strangely serene unreality of a truly remarkable moment. The effects are a perfectly realized essence, not photorealist, but beyond, convincing and strikingly vivid in depth and scope.

And yet it’s not only a thrill of technical accomplishment. It’s stirring to see a dream realized. It’s a simple story told with complex visuals conjuring convincing and transporting awe, inviting an audience to contemplate what a small group of dedicated human beings are capable of, great creation, but also great danger. 9/11 resonances are deftly sidestepped, but are difficult to avoid entirely. Though they remain unspoken, it’s hard not to feel the tower’s extratextual modern absence elevating the final moments as Petit leaves us with his wistful pride in his old memories, and the skyline slowly fades to black. Zemeckis has skillfully returned us to a time when the towers were riskily made magic, Petit daring us to watch and gasp.

Drug War: THE COUNSELOR

A murky drug war thriller, The Counselor keeps its focus on the people in the middle. This isn’t a story of drug lords and D.E.A. agents. It’s a story of lawyers, money launderers, logisticians, and truck drivers. There’s the Counselor (Michael Fassbender), a lawyer who finds himself nebulously floating between a sleazy nightclub owner (an unnaturally tan Javier Bardem) and a guy with connections (Brad Pitt) as a whole lot of drugs are making their way across the border and through the American West, with Chicago, and a $20 million payday, as a final destination. These three men form the core of the film, although there are choice roles for women (Cameron Diaz and Penélope Cruz) who have more and less power than you’d initially assume. These people are involved to greater or lesser extents in moving drugs and money around the world. They all seem to be in control of their part of the plan, but unexpected variables bring danger quicker than anyone expects. As Pitt explains, for the cartels, decapitation isn’t a result of anger or malice. It’s just business.

The screenplay is by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Cormac McCarthy. In his unflinchingly hard-bitten narratives like Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men, and The Road (the latter two adapted into recent films), he specializes in prose so economical and spare he doesn’t even have time for such frills as quotation marks or indented paragraphs. In The Counselor, he finds something of a cinematic equivalent as scenes unfold pertinent information slowly, leaving plenty of gaps that may or may not be filled. It’s a thriller that doesn’t hurtle with propulsion, but rather takes its time rewarding patient and indulgent attention on the part of the audience. It’s a chilly red-blooded literary accumulation of details. The sparsely characterized cast of characters shows us these details through their actions, their personas, their crisply written dialogue that leans heavily on its sense of drive and negotiation. Characters are always jostling for the upper hand, feeling each other out, and moving with confident wariness. When not speaking of negotiations and logistics, they’re prone to speaking in sour metaphor or baring their souls accidentally in eccentric anecdotes.

McCarthy invents characters so tersely individual and specific that it’s little wonder that the Coen brothers are the only ones to get his prose exactly right on the screen. Here, without the benefit of his tough descriptions, his narrative leans on the strength of the cast to imbue the characters with life. They do, creating characters who are at times as inscrutable as they are committed to whatever their goals happen to be. It’s a story that finds a new, welcome character actor around every corner, with room for a diamond dealer played by Bruno Ganz, a prisoner played by Rosie Perez, a priest played by Edgar Ramirez, a supplier played by Dean Norris, and more. Each arriving for only a scene or two, they add immediate richness around the edges, a sense that the world of the ensemble contains multitudes, options and tracks that fade out as the plot narrows its focus and the dangers of the game begin to tighten around our leads’ necks.

Long build ups of methodical process, trucks of drugs packed and unpacked, secret meetings in hotel lobbies, revelations of who is spying and who is being spied upon, move along slowly and glossily. Violence comes fast, frightening, and ends just as quickly, leaving only eerie silences behind. Sudden gore gives way to sudden nothing. It’s all subdued, elegantly terse tension, nasty in a dour, matter-of-fact way with flashes of odd dark humor. A motorcyclist’s severed head sits in its helmet. The murderer hits the top with a thwack, sending the head flying out with a thunk. It’s as awful as it is strangely funny in execution, an extra little detail in a production that’s obsessed with finding moments like these. It’s a muted, grimly determined thriller that’s sleekly designed, handsomely photographed, and loves to get darkly strange from time to time. It’s appealing and unpleasant, sensual and a little funny. Just listen to Bardem’s monologue about what Diaz did to his car and tell me that it’s not all of the above.

Director Ridley Scott, in one of his rare modern day efforts (no Gladiator or Blade Runner here), takes a perfume commercial approach to glassy modern architecture and grimy black market transactional back alleys alike. (Scenes set around Bardem’s pool can’t help but unconsciously echo Scott’s 1979 work for Chanel.) When he, with cinematographer Dariusz Wolski, finds an image like a pet cheetah stalking a jackrabbit in a southwestern desert, or severed fingertips falling onto wet pavement, he lingers with stoic stylishness, finding the fussy details, but showing them with minimal excitement beyond their visual punch. He and McCarthy blend styles quite nicely here. They were at one point working together on an adaptation of Blood Meridian, but this eccentric original screenplay manages to blend their styles in ways a straight adaptation might not. It’s big, striking, and commercial, but granular, elusive, and specific as well. The Counselor is a movie that looks like a big Hollywood thriller, but it moves with sometimes-unexpected tones and rhythms. It is beautifully ugly, fitting for a movie that regards its characters and story with the cold logic and icy gaze of a predator moving in on its prey.

Alien Origins: PROMETHEUS

Prequels are tricky things. Give the audience exactly what they think they want and they might be superficially satisfied at first, but your film is ultimately a trifle that explains away the original film’s mystery. Throw the audience a curveball and they’ll be frustrated and discontent. The trick is finding the right balance, which is precisely what director Ridley Scott and screenwriters Damon Lindelof and Jon Spaiths have set out to do with Prometheus, a film set some years before the events of Scott’s 1979 film Alien, that classic of science fiction horror. What Scott and his writers do here is not describe the backstory of Alien, showing what created the distress signal that led a space freighter and its crew to certain doom from extraterrestrial infestation, but to layer on extra mysteries. This is an engrossing production that operates from a similar stylistic point of view – stately and patient pacing and carefully detailed design – but, aside from a shared fictional universe and a plot that loosely sets the stage for the franchise that follows its events, Prometheus is very much a work that creates an identity of its own.

Part of what made Alien so great was the way it was about characters who had a job to do and set out doing it. They just happened to be interrupted in a spectacularly frightening and entertaining way. Similarly, Prometheus follows a crew of professionals aboard a spaceship (also called Prometheus). They’re off to sort out the mysteries of the universe. It’s a routine exploration, or so the crew assumes. In the group of seventeen are scientists, doctors, pilots, and security. We come to know some of them as the spacecraft arrives at its destination and the hibernation chambers open up. There’s an all-business, sharp-tongued company leader (Charlize Theron), a grizzled captain (Idris Elba), and an ensemble of mostly likable researchers and technicians (character actors Sean Haris, Rafe Spall, Emun Elliott, Benedict Wong, and Kate Dickie). Watching over them as they slept, ensuring nothing went wrong with the ship, was the android, David (Michael Fassbender), who moves with stiff precision and speaks in a way that’s not quite flat. During the trip, he was taught information pertinent to the expedition. Now, he’s eager to help. He’s programmed that way.

Leading this team, at least on the scientific front, is a couple of archaeologists (Noomi Rapace and Logan Marshall-Green), partners scientifically and romantically. They’re the ones with the theories that have convinced trillionaire Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce) to fund this exploration into deep space based on a theory that involves a lot of research a big leap of faith. All around the world they have found hieroglyphics from many cultures depicting giants pointing towards a planetary grouping in the sky. These researchers have somehow extrapolated a map through the universe that they’re sure will lead them to the origins of the human race. They think they’ll find the “engineers” of humanity, but that’s just one possible outcome. When the crew is informed of their true mission, they’re skeptical, but get down to business. The movie proceeds as a terrific rush of jargon, a jumble of pseudo-scientific, quasi-spiritual, pop-philosophical inquiries as the explorers land on the planet and find a structure that is most definitely not naturally occurring. It’s filled with cavernous, craggy halls and echoing chambers filled with massive carvings, oozing containers, dusty control panels and, most frightening of all, large alien corpses.

The film follows the exploration as it slowly, inevitably, falls to pieces through human error, hidden agendas, clashing personalities, and, of course, the mysterious things lurking in the shadows. It doesn’t all make sense by the end; push a little against the plotting and it starts to unravel around loose ends. But the characters are so convincingly acted and with personalities so clearly drawn that I didn’t interrogate their decisions in the moment. I was eager to see what they would discover and how they would react to shifting conditions and information and grew worried for them as new dangers arose. While the film was rolling, it caught me up in a spell of masterful filmmaking. I found it gripping, creepy, and mostly fascinating. This is an intense movie with a slow, inescapable crescendo of suspense played meticulously, soberly and earnestly.

That’s the approach that Ridley Scott has brought to so much of his work as director and a big reason why the quality of his output is so spotty. For every Alien or Black Hawk Down there’s a G.I. Jane or A Good Year. With Prometheus, though, he’s back working in the genre for which he’s most beloved and which he hasn’t been seen since 1982’s Blade Runner. Sci-fi is a genre suited for his detailed approach of complex visuals and serious-minded skimming across the surface of deep topics. (This film’s thematically complicated, or maybe just muddled.) It’s a film about the origins of the universe, but is really only interested in that topic insofar as it provides the opportunity to show off incredible imagination, riffing off the iconography of Alien to find its own great images.

This is an attractively photographed film, a powerful feat of visuals. It’s without a doubt one of the best looking blockbusters in recent memory. It feels out-of-time in style and approach in the best possible way, a cold melancholic 70’s sci-fi mood (a bit of Silent Running, perhaps, or, further back, 2001: A Space Odyssey) in a story told with modern tools. The cinematography from Dariusz Wolski is lush and gorgeous, with impressive 3D depth and a steady sense of space and scale, drinking in the wholly convincing effects work from a small army of artists and Arthur Max’s intricately detailed production design. These images are allowed time to resonate, to be absorbed into the larger texture of the piece in a satisfying way. (See it on the biggest screen you can find!) It’s so dissimilar in approach to the shaky-cam chaos cinema technique so popular over the past several years, even among Scott’s own films, that to see such restraint, such lovingly displayed visual skill, is some kind of marvel.

That’s why, as much as I retroactively doubt my response to the film as I sit here poking through some of its flimsy plotting and unexplained character motivations, especially in the last twenty minutes or so when the aftermath of a virtuoso sequence of body horror goes curiously unacknowledged for a while, I can’t shake the feeling that the movie had a powerful contemplative undertow. The robot man, so scarily, perfectly inhabited by Fassbender, is a created being fully aware of that status, observing humans who are embarking on what is perhaps a futile and, in this case, self-destructive, search for their own creators. There’s a powerful exploration of creation myths stirring half-formed under the gripping style and enthralling pace of Prometheus.

The wordless opening sequence, striking, beautiful, horrifying, could be taken as metaphor or dream or literal truth. The camera soars over a seemingly untouched wilderness until it finds a pale pure-white human-like being standing over a waterfall. This humanoid slowly begins to tear apart at the molecular level and topples over into the water, drifting away as a black mist dissolving into the water. Only then do we jump ahead into the film proper. So, real or imagined within the world of the film, what’s going on here? Is this a creation story? It seems to fit the expedition’s thesis. This immediately arresting curtain raiser announces the film as one that’s out to slip around audience expectations. By the end, though, it’s sure to please those out looking for xenomorphic clues, while still becoming something all its own. It’s a non-prequel prequel that uses a franchise’s groundwork without using it as a crutch, and sets off to explore its own massive ambitions. It doesn’t quite realize them to the extent that perhaps it should. (I might change my mind upon a second viewing, which will happen very soon.) But there’s no use denying how stunning, absorbing, and effective a piece of filmmaking it is.