A driven film about a driven man
Given that most people know the Lance Armstrong narrative — cyclist conquers cancer, wins Tour de France a record seven times, is caught doping and disgraced — it’s incredible that this dramatic retelling is as tense and fascinating as it is. It’s not surprising that the film was made — they’ll make movies about almost anything these days — but that it was made so well. Was the writer, John Hodge, on Benzedrine, or speed? He DID adapt Trainspotting ...
Seriously, the source material is the 2012 book Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong, by Irish journalist David Walsh. He appears in the movie in the form of Chris O’Dowd, one of his country’s most lovable thespian exports.
Armstrong, in contrast, is played by Ben Foster, whose steely gaze has led to roles as bad guys (3:10 to Yuma) and soldiers (Lone Survivor, The Messenger). He doesn’t look much like Armstrong, but compensated by trying a few drugs himself before filming began.
Whether or not that made a difference, Foster presents a can’t- look- away portrait of a man who would do anything to win. This is handled clumsily by director Stephen Frears in an early scene that shows him beating Walsh “fair and square” at a game of foosball. More effective is a later moment in which Armstrong calculatedly misremembers a key event from his 1996 hospitalization with testicular cancer.
Armstrong worked double- duty as cyclist and chief spin doctor, employing a retinue of actual doctors to keep his body in winning shape. Squeamish viewers should note there is a lot of blood on the screen; at the height of his doping regimen, Armstrong and others on his team were having blood removed, stored in a fridge, then re- injected only to be drawn out again for testing.
O’Dowd’s driven journalist makes for a compelling hero, but Armstrong also faced opposition from within. And as a voice of conscience you couldn’t do better than Floyd Landis ( Jesse Plemons), a Mennonite cyclist raised in Farmersville, Penn.
In spite of a seemingly clichéd backstory, Floyd emerges as a well- rounded, conflicted character; is he driven by jealousy or a sense of fairness?
Frears squeezes tension out of these moments, letting personalities rather than facts collide. This isn’t to say that The Program plays with the truth, although it does feel odd when Dustin Hoffman comes in at the 11th hour as a sports promoter eager to gets his money back. ( That suit was finally settled last autumn, just after The Program had its world première at the Toronto festival.)
The director focuses on Armstrong’s rise and fall, paying no heed to his early life and next to none to his relationships and children. This is a driven film about a driven man; Walsh notes with surprise that the cyclist is somehow applying the brakes even while going uphill, and it sometimes feels that the movie is similarly lurching forward.
But that’s to be expected. Armstrong duped the world for years, lied to filmmaker Alex Gibney (who went on to direct the documentary The Armstrong Lie in 2013) and sued the Sunday Times over Walsh’s insistence that he was using banned substances. You can understand the desire to prove that not everyone was a dope. ΩΩΩ