HIGH DRAMA

‘Walk’ an ode to Towers

MOVIE REVIEW

THE WALK

Nails the landing.

Running time: 123 minutes. Rated PG (brief nudity/drug references, mild swearing). In theaters Tuesday night. ★★★

ROBERT ZEMECKIS’ “The Walk’’ reaches for the sky when aerialist Philippe Petit mounts a wire perilously stretched between the original World Trade Center towers, twothirds of the way through this lighthearted docudrama, which makes great use of the 3D IMAX format.

The trailers suggest a realistic thriller, not unlike “Man on Wire,’’ which covered much the same ground and won the 2008 Oscar for Best Documentary. But the familyfriendly film, which had its world premiere Saturday night at the New York Film Festival, instead approaches history with a more fantastical and comic tone, not unlike Zemeckis’ “Forrest Gump.’’

Joseph GordonLevitt’s Pepé Le Pewish French accent takes getting used to, but he turns out to be an inspired choice to play Petit, a former Paris street mime who first gains public attention when he wirewalks between the towers of Notre Dame cathedral.

GordonLevitt’s comic chops and infectious likability help get you past what amounts to lengthy prologue about Petit’s obsession with wirewalking, which crystallizes when he sees a drawing of the WTC towers in a magazine.

With advice from a circus-aerialist mentor (Ben Kingsley) and emotional support from his girlfriend (Charlotte Le Bon), Petit arrives in 1974 New York. He smuggles suspicious gear through customs by joking about what he’s actually planning to do — and waltzes into one of the stillunderconstruction towers simply by donning a hardhat.

Atop the towers, a ragtag conspirator fires an arrow between the roofs so a 140footlong wire can be strung between them.

The film up to here is sometimes slow and occasionally corny — and doesn’t strictly follow the facts, something signaled by Petit’s abundant narration, delivered by GordonLevitt from the torch of the Statue of Liberty.

But Zemeckis finally delivers the goods in abundance in the section that really counts: A vertigoinducing digital recreation of Petit’s famous walk back and forth between the towers, 110 stories above street level. The tension is goosed a bit with Petit’s fantasies of what might go wrong.

In the end, “The Walk’’ finds a graceful way to pay tribute not only to Petit’s bravery and determination — but to the thousands lost on 9/11 in the buildings this daredevil loved so much.