Man On Wire (4 stars)
Directed by James Marsh. With Philippe Petit, Annie Allix, Jean-Louis Blondeau, Barry Greenhouse, Jim Moore, and Alan Welner. (PG-13)
Man On Wire, which draws its succinct title from a police complaint form, is quite possibly the most poetic caper film ever struck. It chronicles the inspiration and planning of a daring (in every respect) public display that today, because of our own sad recent history, carries more meaning than it did in 1974, when French wirewalker Philippe Petit stretched a cable between the towers of the World Trade Center, stepped off a ledge, and danced across the void.
For Petit, it all began in a dentist's office. Already an acrobatic performer, the young Petit was waiting to be treated for a toothache when he picked up a magazine in the waiting room and saw photos of the towers then under construction. It hit him like a bolt—this would be his grand achievement. Tearing the page out of the magazine, he ran from the office.
There was a problem, of course: the towers didn't exist yet. So Petit spent the next years honing his skills in a series of displays amazing in their own right: a walk between the towers of Notre Dame, to the delighted amazement of a priest; and another above the busy Sydney Harbor Bridge in Australia for a less than delighted police department.
But the towers were always on his mind, and the film provides a great deal of archival footage showing the younger Petit methodically planning the event. Though the walk itself requires more thought than his usual efforts—the towers' height and ability to bend with the strong winds at that altitude make it riskier than most—it's really getting there in the first place that proves the biggest obstacle. How do you move almost a ton of material to the roof of a guarded building? And even if you can get it up there, how do you get a wire across several hundred feet of open air?
Petit trades in an older notion of art, and like the old masters, he has a workshop: a group of assistants dedicated to helping him realize his vision. At its core are his lover Annie—who has followed Petit for years, essentially forfeiting much of her own life in the service of his—and his friend Jean-Louis. Together, they piece together a scheme for getting their rigging into the towers, enlisting new acquaintances in America on the trips they take to case the building. It's "like a bank robbery," says Annie.
Watching them realize their plan is one of the film's great joys, and one I won't spoil here; it's enough to say that it involves disguises, a bow and arrow, and a rusty nail. They get help from some unexpected places, but the thrill some of the accomplices feel from being a part of a small crime sours when they see just what he plans to attempt. By the time dawn breaks on their escapade, Petit and his old friends are mostly alone.
It's difficult to say what it is about the event itself that so inspires—when you see Petit out on his cable, it isn't tension you feel, but its opposite. He's at home on the wire, in the air and on the stage. It's the kind of performance that changes lives, and the tears of his friends as they recall the beauty of the act and the heartache that followed are a testament to its power.
Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (3 1/2 stars)
Written and directed by Alex Gibney. With Hunter S. Thompson, Pat Buchanan, Jimmy Carter, Tim Crouse, Johnny Depp, Ralph Steadman, George McGovern, and Jann Wenner. (R)
It was with some dread that I attended a recent screening of Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. The late writer had a voice undeniably his own, but like Kerouac, Lester Bangs, or Bukowski, possessed the sort of personality that seems to attract as many imitators as admirers, and I expected the film to rely heavily on a two-bit theft of his style. I shouldn't have worried. Under the direction of Oscar-winner Alex Gibney (Taxi To The Dark Side), Gonzo is an endearing and illuminating look at an American icon.
Thompson was by no account an easy man to be around—he was a heavy drinker, a drug user, a gun nut, and an absent dad, among other things—but if you didn't get too close, he was a phenomenon of energy that enlivened everything around him. His long, lean frame and clean-cut looks were at odds with his lifestyle—he was a mix of Leave It To Beaver all-Americanism and the acid generation—but they helped gain him entry as a journalist to a variety of closed circles.
First came the Hell's Angels. He traveled with them ("He was embedded!" notes fellow author Tom Wolfe) and eventually published a book about the bikers that made his name and led to new work as a journalist, where he encountered a much more frightening type: the American politician. The high point comes when Thompson is sent to cover the 1972 presidential contest between Nixon and McGovern. At first, nobody pays the new reporter much attention; he's a regular guy who talks football with Nixon. Then he publishes (calling Nixon "so crooked he needed servants to screw on his pants"), and all hell breaks loose.
These were arguably the best years for Thompson, and it's touching—and amazing—to see some of the politicians he skewered sit down to talk about the man they now remember fondly. Pat Buchanan, Jimmy Carter and George McGovern all appear here to eulogize Thompson, and laugh at how well he put their feet to the fire. For McGovern, it's also a time to reflect on an opportunity lost, and how little has changed in today's White House.
There's more: his long association with his artistic double Ralph Steadman, his failed bid for sheriff in Aspen, his caricatured incarnation as Duke in the comic strip Doonesbury. But the emphasis in the later part of the film is on the tragedy of Thompson's decline, and the sad prison of expectations he came to live in. His writing made him a star, but it was a celebrity he couldn't control. As he nears his eventual suicide, he notes ruefully that the myth has outstripped the man. "I'm not only no longer necessary," he says, "I'm in the way. It'd be much better if I died."
Vicky Cristina Barcelona (3 stars)
Written and directed by Woody Allen. With Rebecca Hall, Scarlett Johansson, Javier Bardem, Patricia Clarkson, Penelope Cruz, and Christopher Evan Welch. (PG-13)
It's difficult to remember how long it's been since the last truly great Woody Allen picture was released. Bullets Over Broadway, you say? 1994. Crimes and Misdemeanors? 1989. I've always been partial to the Eastern European noir of Shadows and Fog (1992), but it's still no match for the punch of his best work—the films whose release was a cultural event, as in: "We're going to see the new Woody Allen," a statement that once carried a meaning akin to, "We're going to pick up the new Dylan record."
But if the times have changed, Allen—like Dylan—has soldiered on, producing a new film once a year, and if most of it is second-tier Allen, it's still often better than much of what comes out of Hollywood.
So it is with Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Allen's story about a love triangle—or quadrangle—that unfolds over a few summer months in Spain. Vicky (Rebecca Hall) is a no-nonsense doctoral candidate writing her dissertation on "Catalan Identity"; Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) is the slightly flighty and impulsive friend who accompanies her to Spain out of a spirit of adventure.
There they meet Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem), a painter whose story—he was knifed by his wife—is an aphrodisiac to Cristina, a dilettante desperate for a life of artistic tragedy. When he offers to take them away for the weekend, Cristina overrules her friend and agrees to the trip, though she leaves open the question of a menage-a-trois proposed by Juan Antonio.
As the rake, Bardem is at once charming and ultimately harmless—the seducer who understands that it's not a victory if your quarry doesn't come to you. In that way he's a lot like George Clooney, another rough-hewn leading man whose confidence in his own charm is his best weapon. It's a testament to Allen's history that he continues to find actors so willing to appear in his films; having people like Bardem on board helps lift the action above some soggy sections. Most of those feature a vapid performance from Scarlett Johansson; the relatively unknown Rebecca Hall does well, especially in a heartbreaking scene with just one line: "I'm too scared."
The trio arrive in the picturesque town of Oviedo (where, in real life, the director is now honored with a life-size statue), where romantic entanglements ensue—the soft sounds of Spanish guitar, a foot mistakenly grazed by another beneath a table, and, most of all, the arrival of Juan's distraught ex-wife Maria Elena (Penelope Cruz) all collude to keep the merry-go-round spinning.
When it settles down, the one seemingly happy (at least for a time) relationship in the film is an interesting one, and one that Allen probably wouldn't have been able to explore had he set his story in his old Manhattan stomping grounds. Not that Manhattan couldn't handle it, but the Allen of that era—before the European tour of the last few years—seemed too set in his ways to consider it. His characters here still talk about seeing their shrinks, and they're still hung up on sex in one way or another, but after all these decades, they seem finally about to relax.
Also this week: Main Street Motion Media has returned to help keep the projectors running at the Academy of Music in Northampton. Their ongoing summer film series mixes recent films with established classics; this weekend brings the documentary Up The Yangtze (full review on the Advocate website) and two Hal Ashby films: Shampoo, the 1975 film starring Warren Beatty as a libidinous hairdresser; and Coming Home, Ashby's 1978 look at the emotional costs of the war in Vietnam. It stars Jane Fonda and Jon Voight, both of whom won the Oscar for their performance.
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com.
