The Walk

After making a recent trip to France, I now have a new found respect for the French and their oddball ways. While I was over there I learned that 90% of their women are unbelievably beautiful, they have amazing wine, and their fashion is off the charts! Now I realize that I am not stating anything groundbreaking here but some of this stuff gets lost in the back of your mind when you see their national soccer team quit on one another during the World Cup or you happen to come across a few of them passionately arguing in the streets of Nice.

It’s just something about the combination of their passionate facial expressions, hand gestures, and their language that makes me giggle. Maybe it’s simply a Pavlovian response of mine but whatever it is I can’t help but lose it whenever I hear them talk; I always either picture Inspector Clouseau with his pipe and his deerstalker or I see Pepe le Pew sexually assaulting a female skunk. Either way I am more than certain that French people everywhere will find these thoughts to be extremely offensive, but those that do must keep in mind that I also have an idiot friend who thinks that every French male who lived in the 70’s looked like a hobbit from Lord of the Rings.

The point of all of this is, if you already have these images in your head as you enter the theater, it will help you get through the opening monologue and the borderline annoying narration that pops up all throughout the movie. Of course I rolled my eyes at it but the narration was actually done fairly well so it doesn’t take away from the overall quality of the storytelling. But this is more of a testament to Joseph Gordon-Levitt and his immersion into the French dreamer Philippe Petit than anything else.

The amount of effort it took to not only become fluent in French but to also learn how to tight rope a wire is something that should definitely be commended. And based off of his performance, you can certainly expect him to be nominated for quite a few awards this upcoming season. I’ve seen so many actors who just take the lazy way out when it comes to playing foreign characters; so much so that they force the writers into putting in overtime simply because they refuse to learn the language or even put in real work into the accent. So as a result, you’re stuck listening to conversations between Germans (for example) that are inexplicably speaking English around one another when there’s not an American or even a Brit in sight. It just takes away from the overall authenticity of the story. And in my opinion, if you’re getting paid millions of dollars to do a biopic, you should actually put some work in it.

If you’re not familiar with the story, it’s about a Frenchman named Philippe who has the dream of tight roping across the Twin Towers in New York. So he dedicates his entire life to achieving this dream by learning from his mentor, a master wire walker, while recruiting a team to help him infiltrate the Towers.

Thankfully it’s all presented in a fun and funny manner, so what would normally be a cool 60 Minutes story is actually turned into a fairly entertaining movie. But the most exhilarating part of the story is when he gets on the wire to cross the Towers. Director Robert Zemeckis does an excellent job of making you feel as though you are literally up there with Philippe, so much so, that you find yourself screaming obscenities at the screen. I mean, what more can you ask for in a movie?

I went in highly skeptical but in the end I found it to be money well spent; and because it’s such an inspirational story, you will definitely see it nominated for Best Picture when it comes time for the Oscars. I rate this movie as FRESH and suggest that you pop in with the family.