Filmmaker James Marsh takes a novel approach to the topic of the World Trade Center, a caper documentary (to coin a genre) on the forty-five-minute funambulist stunt undertaken in 1974 by the Frenchman Philippe Petit, walking a tightwire between the Twin Towers. The events of 9/11 are never mentioned, but they’re an irrepressible subtext in the found footage of the site before and during construction, and in the cloak-and-dagger planning and execution of the covert assault on the Towers. One still photo of the wirewalker poised in midair even captures an overhead jet — at a safe clearance — in the same frame. Because so much of the film consists of present-day talking heads (interwoven with black-and-white re-enactments and authentic archive footage), there’s something a bit coy about the omission. Certainly the enormity of the later crime needn’t be introduced in mitigation of Petit’s mischief. But the disappearance of the Towers from the face of the earth would serve to underscore the singularity, the unrepeatability, of the stunt. Perhaps that goes literally without saying. And yet, if the Towers meant so much to Petit from the first moment he learned of the project (surreptitiously ripping a page out of a magazine at the dentist’s office), then it would be only natural to solicit from him something in the way of an elegy. The documentary’s function as a caper thriller, meanwhile, is on balance a success. The narrative information doesn’t always come in the best order or fullest form, and it comes with a good many interruptions and side trips, but the details of the operation will often, for one reason or another, boggle the mind. And although the undimmed history, along with the manifest survival of the talking heads, would seem to put a low ceiling on the suspense, anyone with the slightest touch of acrophobia will not, at the climax, be able to keep palms dry. (2008) — Duncan Shepherd