James Marsh makes the practical work behind an extraordinary undertaking absorbing, and gives the people doing it their due. His gift for suspense is clearest to us in Man on Wire, where the helpers matter as much as the feat.
Fi1m perspective
In Man on Wire (2008), James Marsh keeps returning to the arrangements for Philippe Petit’s high-wire walk between the Twin Towers. The preparations make a splendidly unlikely ambition feel like a job with an alarming number of things to get right. Marsh gives the helpers enough attention for us to see the labour that Petit’s enthusiasm has created. We felt anxious watching the preparations, because the detail made every possible mistake easier to imagine. This is filmmaking we recommend without hesitation, even when a reconstruction briefly makes us wish he would return to the people remembering it.
Marsh had already moved from the documentary Wisconsin Death Trip (1999) to the scripted The King (2005) before Man on Wire became his breakthrough. He continued with the documentary Project Nim (2011), about a chimpanzee language experiment, then returned to drama with Shadow Dancer (2012) and The Theory of Everything (2014). True stories recur across those changes of form. The attraction is clear in Man on Wire: a remembered event supplies suspense, humour and people whose motives deserve a closer look.
Editor Jinx Godfrey is crucial to that effect, moving between interviews, archive footage, photographs and reconstructions at the pace of a thriller. There is still time to understand the planning; speed never becomes an excuse for muddle. Igor Martinović’s cinematography gives the reconstructed passages the feel of a caper, which suits Marsh’s heist structure. The reservation is that some of those scenes look too plainly staged beside the more absorbing archive material. When Petit is already telling the story so persuasively, the extra illustration can be unnecessary.
Marsh is better at handling his storyteller. He allows Petit’s flamboyance to explain some of the team’s devotion without letting it excuse how much he asks of them. We can enjoy the account and still notice the egotism, a balance that keeps the film from becoming a simple celebration of one remarkable man. That attention to the helpers is what we would hope to find whenever Marsh returns to a true story. Start with Man on Wire before following him into the dramas.
Biography
James Marsh is a British film and documentary director. Born on 30 April 1963 in Truro, Cornwall, he studied at St Catherine's College, Oxford.
He directed the documentary Man on Wire (2008), about Philippe Petit's high-wire walk between the Twin Towers, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. His other notable works include the feature films The Theory of Everything (2014) and The King (2005), as well as the documentary Project Nim (2011).
