Man on a Ledge is, unlike at least its overt subject, tedious and unflattering, intensifying and dissolving its clarity conjunctively with the substance of its Name. It scants dialectic hubris for short escapist jollies, progressing with the slow or tortuous wits of refined—or traumatized—ego. For one, the only complete Form during its funeral scene is the word “free”, as if to categorically deny the lurch of freedom at an intersection of its axes from an unfair position, showing a crepuscular or poorly guarded madness, an unconscious preformation, and seeding tenuous relation to its eventual cultivation of long-winded attention, that is, to crowd censorship. And as if to celebrate the episode—rather than the life, the very long life—of the city, relished unto its people, it is caught dragging out a close thing to behaviourism just to better know itself, proving how canny and normalistic it is that urban suicidal ideation of its depicted nature—that is, making an impassive cost and absurdist laughing stock of egoistic differences ramped up to, at least here, their rarest impediment (as opposed to burning and securing the freedom of professional paths like many movies)—has been mostly foreclosed and repressed into more derogative, less intensive former eras, revealing that suicidal ideation is a merit, a critical mass, in and of itself.
Man on a Ledge burns out quickly, despite its subliminal and duplicitous ties; it takes off spiralling in unhelpful directions, practically as if its heist—which conveys a sarcastic or nonsensical, aphasic separation of artistic modalities—could go without saying; its developmental connect-omics are ham-fisted like its symptomatology, when this latter should be the domain of experience, whose purposiveness is infallible (and so, typically, is its depiction). It is a comedy of fuses—from incipience outward—leaving its legal kinship to portmanteaus, to the casual dress of humility, and intimacy or close affect for its expected part skims around psychotically, showing a virtual eye only as filler, and being a clear reminder that movies—unlike people—do not understand the meaning of difficult lengths.
