Release Date: August 8, 2008

(out of 4)

Afraid of heights? Here’s a new documentary that might stop your pulse.

If documentaries have undergone an evaporating popularity in recent years, "Man on Wire" could be the first one in some time to capture a wide audience. Advance audiences reportedly love this film. This audience, which was brought in by focus groups before it has been released, loved this film. My opinion: Thrills, gasps and peculiarity. It is kind of special, occupied with, uh, high-wire feats you’ve probably never seen before. No pun intended.

Philippe Petit, the special and unique Frenchman artist at the center of the film, was a tightrope walker at a very young age. Footage dating back to the early 1970s shows him walking tightropes rigged on top of the crossbeams of public bridges overhead traffic. Friends rigged the wires, his girlfriend recorded the action on film, and Petit walked the narrow line. These kind of stunts were acts of adventure, spectacle, avante-garde art.

Petit, whom at 24 looked like the gymnast Olympian version of a young Malcolm McDowell, was only warming up to his ultimate challenge: to crosswalk along a wire rigged between the two towers of the World Trade Center. The film’s main concentration is recreating this spectacle that took Petit and accomplices eight months to plan. It wasn’t the daring act that Petit was afraid of but instead WTC security.

Directed by James Marsh, the film intersperses actual footage with recreated footage (shot in black & white) of the break-in. The dramatization and pacing makes "Man on Wire" feel like a bank heist flick, with Petit as the mastermind and accomplices as tools men, blueprint artists and efficiency experts. The preparation required the correct infiltration to sneak in heavy cables and rigging equipment to the tower roofs, and the more difficult strategy to pass the wire from one tower to the other.

The story is retold in narration by the aged Petit and accomplices recall who narrate by speaking directly to the camera. The zig-zagging between the interviews and the black & white guerrilla old footage makes the film feel like a crossbreed style of Errol Morris and Oliver Stone. Peppered with lots of humor. Petit still has a childlike joy in his remembrances, and his accomplices were also in it for the mischief.

By the time we’re convinced that Petit has the balance and metaphysical autonomy to walk the tightrope, we’re nervous about the WTC crosswalk because of a more strenuous challenge. The heights of the towers are so high that it fosters a wind velocity that separates it from Petit’s earlier challenges. Petit hardly cared and refused to be defeated by this hindrance. The show must goes on, and "Man on Wire" gives us quite a show.