Great caper movies, of which James Marsh’s Man on Wire is one, are ultimately movies about stolen moments of ecstasy, in which the stars temporarily align to make the impossible possible, all the while rendering pedestrian notions of property and moral judgments about crime inapplicable. The best of them work not just because they so deftly calibrate tension across a meticulous breakdown of the process behind the crime, but because they make us feel like being privy to that process is equivalent to being let in on a life-changing secret. We’re made to understand that whatever felonies are committed (and whether or not the perpetrators are forced to face the consequences) are besides the point. The point is the relationship between the perpetrators, forged over long nights huddled over scale models and blue prints, tested over the plan’s execution in the face of unexpected hurdles, and confirmed in a giddy moment of “we really pulled it off” glory, a transcendent high which, we’re made to understand, is the only real reason for living.  It’s an intimate cycle — flirtation, consummation, afterglow — and as such, its as romantic as a Hollywood romance, and offers the same kind of vicarious pleasure. Stolen kisses or stolen cash, it’s pop about secular salvation.

The best examples of the this model at work in recent Hollywood history are the first and third installments of Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s series, both of which relate that feeling of afterglow in long scenes of the criminals assembled in silent wonder, contemplating a man made wonder of Vegas. The more spectacular of these scenes comes towards the end of Ocean’s 13, when the boys watch fireworks over the city to the sound of Frank Sinatra’s “This Town” (in its own way, pop about salvation: “This town is a use-you town, an abuse-you town/ until you’re found, town”). The gang’s feeling of transcendent criminal accomplishment is translated to us via a commonplace but no less transcendent experience that we can understand.  This translation is the caper film’s gift to the average viewer, who will never know what it’s like to stand outside of a casino from which they’ve robbed millions of dollars and know that they’ve gotten away with it, but have most likely had the experience of craning their neck to look up at something big and beautiful and unexpected up in the sky.

Man on Wire is a caper movie built around one man’s attempt to offer that transcendent gift for real, and this grounding in reality that gives it a “wow” factor to match any Hollywood confection. Built out of talking head testimony, judicious reenactment and the criminal’s own obsessive self-documentation, James Marsh’ award-winning documentary puts the viewer in the position of the accomplice on the ground who, despite having full knowledge of exactly what what went into the stunt, is still almost unable to believe that they really pulled it off. Like any great caper movie, Man on Wire tells us that this feeling––and, maybe more importantly, the sharing of this feeling––is the ultimate life affirmation.

With wire walker Phillippe Petit’s own home movie footage supplying the meat of his imagery, Marsh gets his narrative from interviews with Petit himself and his associates and accomplices. As laid out by Petit himself, this is the story of a mad genius who bragged about living life a life of total rebellion, as close to the edge of death as possible. That his Petit’s focus on his death-defying stunts was single-minded; when his long-suffering girlfriend discusses Philippe’s courtship, she says, “he introduced me to his wire,” and at first I misread the subtitle as “wife”, so resigned the actual love interest seemed to playing second best in a three-way relationship. And yet, there’s nothing reckless about any of it: the full testimony reveals that, behind the scenes, Petit scientifically engineered his most dangerous stunts with the kind of precision that could only come from someone with no intention of leaving his own fate up to chance.

That this all takes place around the most famously fallen office buildings in modern history without ever seeming maudlin is a selling point, for sure, but it’s not accidental. Imagine this material in a lesser filmmaker’s hands, with the stock shot of the burning towers, just to make extra triple super sure that we Never Forget. Marsh never goes near directly broaching the topic of the destruction of the World Trade Center, because he doesn’t need to. With the exception of a single shot towards the end of the film (a long hold on a still photograph of Petit on the wire, in between the towers and under a plane flying seemingly close overhead), we’re reminded of the fate of the WTC only incidentally, where Petit’s mission throws it into relief.

Accomplice Jean-Louis describes the stunt as “something so beautiful that it doesn’t hurt somebody, but gives something.” This post-hippie benevolence and utopian aestheticism were infectious in the short term: Petit’s walk attracted so much positive attention to the towers that the NYPD dropped charges against him. On a longer time line, when all that remains is imagery, the undeniable beauty of that black-clad figure on a literal walk on top of the world is transcendant without translation.