Director Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future, Forrest Gump, Flight) perfectly applies his fascination with technology to storytelling in The Walk, which is one of the year’s best pictures.
On one layer, this is a light, whimsical movie about an acrobat taking his acrobatics seriously to prove an important point about human potential to the whole world. The visual, first-person narrative from the Statue of Liberty’s torch and other fanciful touches are part of the performance. Mr. Zemeckis, who also co-wrote The Walk, drives his idea of what one might call a performance artist’s creative need to act out over and over. Executed on the world’s tallest skyscrapers, a true story based on a high-wire walk by French acrobat Philippe Petit, it doesn’t get old and it doesn’t get in the way. As with any practiced, crafted and tuned live performance, the flourish enhances the daring act.
That the skyscrapers—and Mr. Zemeckis comes from a great American city of skyscrapers, Chicago—are the twin towers of the World Trade Center (1973-2001) make the events depicted in this groundbreaking movie more enticing.
Seen by this writer at Sid Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard in IMAX 3D, The Walk begins as the tale of a boy who seeks to create his own “sacred space” in a circle on the sidewalks of Paris. Of course, this puts him at odds with police and his own parents, who neither support nor understand his strange pursuits. Philippe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) mimes, juggles and, eventually, walks on wire. It is his passion to command an audience’s attention to certain aspects of reality as he recasts them. Philippe performs magic. He rides a unicycle. When he sees a picture of the World Trade Center under construction in New York City, he makes up his mind—he calls seeing the photograph “providence”—about embarking upon his greatest adventure.
As Philippe plans his trespassing crime, he sees walking on a wire between the Twin Towers as a defining part of his own, personal journey. So he sets out to practice his skill at a circus, where he enlists the aid of a seasoned high-wire performer (Ben Kingsley), who becomes Philippe’s mentor. Here, too, he breaks away from tradition and his insistence on doing things his way leads to other complications. As Philippe loses support from blood relatives, he gains support from those related only by their shared passion for their own values, such as singer Annie (Charlotte Le Bon, The Hundred-Foot Journey) and photographer Jean-Louis (Clément Sibony, The Tourist). “I want to know more,” Philippe says at one point in The Walk. His chosen friends and master help him learn to acquire new knowledge.
The camaraderie is infectious, as Philippe attracts an audience, makes mistakes, expresses fleeting moments of doubt, falls and learns how to relax into the high-wire act. In the process, he becomes the ultimate live performer, appreciating his own choices, audiences and themes and gauging how to assess the potential for distraction, danger and the risks of the fears of others. For example, one of his team members has a crippling fear of heights. Philippe, in dealing with his own fear of losing the lad, leads by example to provide the right measure of confidence in his own ability. With Mr. Kingsley’s circus ringmaster looking on while dragging on a cigarette in an elegant holder, Philippe studies cable thickness and load strength with the precision of an engineer. No detail, lesson or fact escapes his notice or accounting.
He is a cunning criminal; a foreigner plotting to intrude upon the World Trade Center for subversive purposes, and with a van full of foreign accomplices no less. No one who knows the history of the Twin Towers can ignore the stark similarities and differences in his crime and the acts of Islamic terrorist mass murder that would blast and ultimately take the skyscrapers down in 1993 and 2001. Philippe practices on the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris before he comes to lower Manhattan for that exceptional act in August of 1974, and, in a sense, the closest he comes to having a religion is his steely conviction in himself and in the power to master his mind and body here on earth, strictly on his own terms and for his own sake.
Philippe Petit is the antidote to the religious terrorist. He targets the World Trade Center to express himself and glorify man’s greatest achievements, not to martyr himself and destroy man’s greatest achievements. He calls his unexpected act by its French word: the coup.
The attempted coup is, as recreated by Mr. Zemeckis with amazing clarity and realism, body-tingling, nerve-wracking and breathtaking. The practices take place to Alan Silvestri’s jazz score. The act itself happens in silence or with music that matches its sense of the sublime. “The outside world starts to disappear,” Philippe recalls of his day on top of the world. “I feel the wire supporting me with the towers supporting the wire” and, in an instant, at the birth of the rising steel skyscrapers soaring into the clouds, the Frenchman who juggled for money on the sidewalks of Paris enacts something both beautiful and defiant in perfect unity with nature and the manmade. The Walk is meant for this moment, and everyone, especially Gordon-Levitt, cast and the special effects crew led by Mr. Zemeckis, lets it linger in wonder and amazement for a spectacularly powerful climax in cinema.
The Walk is that soulful. Who better than an independent Frenchman standing on top of France’s gift to America to stir the spirit of free enterprise that built the greatest nation on earth? Petit, who, in reality, called for the World Trade Center to be rebuilt, reduces his accomplishment’s metrics to its essential meaning in the beginning of The Walk. He speaks of a choice between life and death. This is the unspoken, fundamental contest between the World Trade Center acts of 1974 and 2001. The Walk, in two parts playfulness and precision, depicts peace and serenity as the proper reward for honoring the manmade upon its creation. Philippe Petit put an acrobatic accent on two great symbols of American capitalism; Robert Zemeckis brings the performance and its exhaustive practices gloriously to the screen.
If it achieves nothing more than this, an exact recreation of the single most life-affirming moment in the World Trade Center’s brief history here on earth, The Walk, which does what America should have done and rebuilds the Twin Towers, is worth every second of its two tantalizing hours.
Premiering on the History Channel at 6 pm ET on September 11, Rebuilding the World Trade Center is a 2-hour premiere by Belfast, Northern Ireland, artist and photographer Marcus Robinson as he films, draws and paints the rebuilding using 13 cameras in time lapse photography. Interspersed with on-camera interviews with several construction workers, the cumulative effect is sparse, haunting and, at its best, elegiac.
However, there is no mention of what necessitates a rebuilding: an act of war by those moved by Islam. There is no explanation of the four buildings which will comprise the new World Trade Center, no recap of history of the previous, fallen World Trade Center (1973-2001), which was attacked by Moslem terrorists in 1993 and destroyed by Moslem terrorists in 2001 murdering 3,000 innocents who were mostly American. Rebuilding the World Trade Center also omits any detailed tutorial in the architecture, design, construction, politics and process. The program, which airs in color with eerie music, time lapse filming of the construction and individual straight-on camera interviews with workers, assumes a great deal of foreknowledge about the project.
A concrete carpenter is the only worker to imply a reference to the act of evil which permeates this appropriately melancholy telefilm, referring to “planes hitting the Twin Towers” which could be construed as an accident if you don’t know what happened 13 years ago. Most of the workers tell their tales in affecting, occasionally powerful, segments about the challenging work of building new towers high above Manhattan. One man speaks of losing a loved one on 9/11. One worker talks about becoming an iron worker after 9/11 in order to rebuild. One talks about a relative who worked on building the original towers. The net effect is a salty slice of New York City life, complete with thick accents, attitudes and that unmistakable sense that Manhattan represents the best of everything.
For example, another concrete carpenter, Estelle St. Clair, talks about the “danger and seriousness” of her work and how what she calls the “pure joy” of seeing and shaping New York’s skyline is her highest reward. This is the best aspect of Rebuilding the World Trade Center. The paintings by Robinson punctuate the program amid what amount to exhibitions of workers’ unions’ cronyism and nepotism – the film skips an entire year – as the workers talk about the pressure of the project without any reference to dates of completion (rebuilding starts in 2006) and the cause of delays or whether the project is successful in terms of design.
As the spire is assembled, for instance, there’s no mention of its purpose. Answers are absent on why the rebuilding is taking so long, whether there have been any accidents, injuries or deaths or what New Yorkers think of the newly emerging center if they think of it at all. Sadness hangs over every piece of metal, especially for those who think America’s the greatest country ever to exist on earth and that the Twin Towers should have been rebuilt better and taller. But the variety of workers – ethnically diverse New York-area Indians, blacks, Jews and women – are a melting pot of proud, outspoken individualists and this moody if incomplete telefilm gives a glimpse of Americans who embody the best of what the enemy hates about the West and its infidels. Final scenes include shots moving and looking skyward up the building like the last scene from The Fountainhead (1949) and, when a worker speaks with awe of being able to almost see the curvature of the earth, it is impossible not to think of three thousand ghosts and their last day on earth.
A story of its time, with indictments of individual liberty and with apologies for Islam, the made-for-cable Path to Paradise: The Untold Story of the World Trade Center Bombing is an otherwise capable account of what led to the February 26, 1993, Islamic terrorist attack on the Twin Towers before Moslem jihadists brought them down and mass murdered nearly 3,000 people eight years later.
What’s essential to know about this picture, which premiered on premium cable channel Home Box Office (HBO) on June 14, 1997, is that it aired after the first major Islamic terrorist attack on the U.S. mainland though before the worst act of war in U.S. history. Both assaults were initiated by the same idea-driven fundamentalists and against the same primary target that would be forced by faith-based monsters to collapse on September 11, 2001. This provides a unique context in which to examine HBO’s telefilm as a fact-based TV drama with enough time and distance from both strikes on the two towers.
As with almost every film about Islamic terrorist attacks ever made, Path to Paradise is bad on framing the enemy’s philosophy and better on recreating dramatic tension. Historians can see and judge for themselves, and there is a significant library of movies to study, that movies about acts of war by jihadists diminish the role of jihad – the Islamic faith’s tenet that life is an unending political struggle and one must wage war on the infidel – in direct proportion to the proliferation of the siege. For example, the earliest pictures about attacks on Americans on planes, ships and diplomatic missions explicitly name and identify, and often explore, Islam as the root of radical Moslem motive to strike down the infidel (anyone associated with the West). As recently as 1996, with Stuart Baird’s excellent Executive Decision starring Kurt Russell and Halle Berry, deeply religious Moslems are rightly depicted and named as seeking to destroy the West with catastrophic acts of war.
This is hardly the case anymore, and, as attacks get more catastrophic, references to Islamic terrorism shrink. The worst movies, such as Steven Spielberg’s Munich, imply that these acts of war are justified. Path to Paradise falls somewhere in between, neither ignoring and rationalizing jihad nor properly pegging Islam as the source for the worst modern acts of war. One Islamic character, based on an Egyptian who purportedly tried to warn the U.S. about the parking garage bombing of the Twin Towers, insists that Islam means peace.
Path to Paradise, which co-stars Marcia Gay Harden, is, as its title suggests, focused on what motivates Islamic terrorists to commit mass murder, which they did on that winter morning in lower Manhattan, blowing up a rented van, injuring 1,000 and killing six people. Here, Peter Gallagher (the film’s best asset and in one of the actor’s strongest performances) portrays FBI Special Agent John Anticlev recounting in retrospect how he and NYPD Detective Lou Napoli (Paul Guilfoyle), who were part of a joint task force on counterterrorism in the New York area, tried to catch and stop the Moslem radicals before they struck. After an assassin (Shaun Toub), who follows the commands of a blind jihadist sheik (Andreas Katsulas), murders a rabbi, it’s the good New York cops versus the bad and incompetent cops, who refuse to judge Islamic terrorist videos and writings – one translator dismisses the hateful, anti-American ideas as “Islamic poetry” – and the terrorists only fail to bring down the twin skyscrapers through their own errors. Aided by an Islamic bomber (Art Malik) who sails through U.S. immigration despite being in violation of the law, the terrorists come, go and attack as they please.
This leads the Gallagher character to conclude that freedom of religion is the problem, a barrier to stopping crime and acts of war. But Path to Paradise repeatedly demonstrates and dramatizes to the contrary in spite of itself, showing that a nation up to here in Big Government with layers and layers of controls and bureaucracies is at the mercy of those who follow rules. In an early pre-Mom role, actress Allison Janney appears as a policewoman who properly ridicules the incompetence of the federal government in fighting Islamic terrorism. So much of what’s depicted here, and this telefilm aired years after the 1993 attack, prefigures the government’s total dereliction of providing a national defense.
After the rabbi was gunned down by a jihadist, for instance, a government spokesman rushed to judgment and declared that there was “no indication at all” of a jihadist conspiracy, just like today’s government spokesmen do about Moslem attacks on the U.S. at Fort Hood, Boston and Benghazi. The police statement was made when evidence indicated that the opposite was true.
It’s tragic, too, that Marcia Gay Harden’s FBI agent deadpans to the informant that “the FBI doesn’t get to Libya much,” when he comes clean about the blind sheik’s jihadist plots in Africa (the Obama administration supposedly sent the FBI to Libya to investigate the 9/11/2012 attack on Americans at Benghazi). The reality that the plot to destroy the West and take over the world for barbarism is winning is undeniable as the informant talks about plans to remove Egyptian dictator and U.S. ally Hosni Mubarak. Like so much of what’s depicted in Path to Paradise, that happened months and years ago.
Nothing is so obvious, of course, as one watches this movie, as the fact that the Twin Towers would soon be downed and Islamic law would spread across the globe, gather power and topple country after country from Algeria to Iraq (now emerging as a new caliphate) as forecast by the lone voices against jihad who are deemed too harsh, extreme and pro-Western. Structured like a police procedural, the 90-minute Path to Paradise doesn’t get into the more detailed plot points, including what biological agent may have been prepared for or laced in the 1993 World Trade Center bomb, but it is an excellent example of what powers up the jihad and allows it to spread, fester and annihilate. In fact, unintentionally, the picture’s end credits punctuate the point that appeasement of jihad – the West’s refusal to name, identify and destroy state sponsors of Islamic terrorism – is ending America from within: a disclaimer as the towers still stand while the credits roll reads: “While based upon actual events, this film portrays the actions of a small group of individuals. It does not reflect the beliefs of the majority of Muslims and Arabs.”
How do the 1997 filmmakers know what they claim to know about the beliefs of most Arabs and Moslems? Blank out. Public opinion polls are not cited as evidence, not that polls are permitted in religious dictatorships that dominated the Arab world, then and more so now.
With the Arab world from Africa to Asia disappearing into a barbaric caliphate rising against the West, the assertion that most Moslems are peaceful cannot be accepted without question. The towers are destroyed. The Pentagon has been attacked. The rights of the individual are under siege from an omnipotent American state rising in proportion to the rise of jihad and not a single counterrevolution against Islamism has taken root in the Arab world.
Path to Paradise despite the drawbacks provides an account of how the looming empty spaces and spreading darkness came to be.
Author’s Note
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