"The Walk" starts selling itself to you the second you settle into your chair ("To walk on the wire, this is life!" Petit tells us, jamming his face into the lens). It keeps selling and selling and selling itself, telling you how amazing and wondrous everything is via voice-over and straight-into-the-camera narration, verbally explaining things that Zemeckis' images are already doing a peerless job of showing you, sometimes breaking the movie's spell by having the hero chime in with an observation that's nowhere near as eloquent as the sight of Petit doing what only Petit can do. Petit's narration might be the most counterproductive and irritating narration ever to be glommed onto a potentially great motion picture. Suffering through it is like visiting the Grand Canyon or the Metropolitan Museum of Art with someone who keeps exclaiming how incredible and astonishing everything is every fifteen seconds, to the point where you want to leave and come back the next day by yourself so that you have an actual experience.
"And with this pencil stroke, my fate was sealed," the narration tells us, over images of Petit drawing a line between the towers as depicted in a magazine ad that he peruses while waiting to see a doctor—as if we couldn't figure out why that moment is important, in a movie about a guy who tightrope-walked between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. "This is the beginning of my dream!" The nadir of the movie's poor judgment occurs during its still-mostly-astonishing climax, when Petit lies down on the cable, engulfed in misty cloud cover, and watches a lone gull hovers over him and seems to stare into his eyes, as if wondering if he's some kind of bird, too. The moment has the eerie mesmerizing power of an incantation, but sure enough, here comes Petit in voice-over telling us about how this bird came out of the clouds and hovered there over him and dammit, movie, don't you know we have eyes and ears?
I don't believe in the admonition "show, don't tell." It's a maxim cited by hack screenwriters who make money from how-to books and seminars, not from actual screenwriting. Some of the greatest films in cinema history have active, insistent, even constant narration. But such films are not just telling in place of showing. They're showing while they're telling and telling while they're showing, and the verbal component adds to, and often complicates or subverts, the images and sounds. That's not the case here. Aside from a few practical observations about being an acrobat, there is nary a word of Petit's narration that couldn't be red-lined for redundancy. If what you want is to hear people talk about Petit (including Petit), you might as well buy a copy of the memoir upon which the "The Walk" is based, or watch James Marsh's great 2008 nonfiction film "Man on Wire," which includes so many re-enactments that it's half a drama, anyway.
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