Entertainment OneStephen Frears’ The Program examines how the notorious US cyclist maintained the fiction that he wasn’t doping. Critic Owen Gleiberman says it’s one of the year’s best films.
As a bike-racing champion, Lance Armstrong was always a little too good to be true: the invincible golden god, the racer who beat cancer and went on to win the Tour de France seven times. Then again, the slightly unbelievable quality of it all was part of Armstrong’s superman appeal. Even when the rumours about his use of performance-enhancing drugs grew to a fever pitch, Armstrong clung to his big lie, and he did it with such fervour and commitment – and his fans so didn’t want the doping reports to be true – that you felt your head spinning: what was the reality, anyway? Could he really be that much of a scoundrel?
The power of The Program, Stephen Frears’ entertainingly artful and compelling docudrama about the Armstrong saga, is that it begins where the real story ended: with our full knowledge that Armstrong took EPO (erythropoietin), human growth hormone and other serums to increase his endurance – and that his entire reign as champion was a fiction. Seen that way, from his point of view, the story, astoundingly, becomes a brand new story. And this one isn’t just about Armstrong or his enablers. It’s about us.
At the time he admitted his culpability, it seemed as if Armstrong fell from grace. But, as The Program makes clear, there was never any grace to fall from. Lance, played with cutting authenticity by Ben Foster, arrives in France for his first Tour, and as the race is about to begin, a French biker leans over to taunt him, saying that he may be a winner in the US, but that he’ll never win here. It’s his wink-wink way of telling Lance that many bikers in the Tour de France use dope to enhance their red-blood-cell count, sending more oxygen to their muscles for speed. There’s no way that Lance can compete.
From the start, Armstrong learns that doping is widespread – that it’s how this sport is played. So when he takes his team over to Switzerland, where they enter a chemist to buy EPO (which is sold over-the-counter there), in his mind he’s not trying to ‘cheat’. He just wants a level playing field. These scenes, along with those in which he endures the ravages of chemotherapy to fight testicular cancer, put the audience in Armstrong’s shoes: what would we have done?
The answer isn’t simple, because if Armstrong had decided not to use performance-enhancing drugs, his career as a racer – his entire dream – would have been over before it began. There’s a shuddery logic to his decision: he will corrupt himself, but (in his mind) only as much as everyone else does. When he places himself in the hands of Dr Michele Ferrari (Guillaume Canet), a blustery charlatan of an Italian physician who has turned the hidden use of performance-enhancing drugs into a science, Lance does it with the cocky conviction that he has the right to be champion.
Frears, accomplishing here his most audacious job of directing since The Grifters (1990), works with the speed and agility of a racer himself, pushing the story ahead and showing us how multi-faceted it was. Armstrong’s victory over cancer becomes his personal myth of winning at any cost, and when he founds a cancer charity, it’s out of compassion but it’s also a way to market himself as the ‘sporting hero who cares’.
Before long, winning the Tour de France becomes his addiction. The fame, the endorsement deals, the adrenalised mystique of the race itself – Frears captures how it all added up to a kind of ‘movie’ in which Lance was the star. He knew he was deceiving the world. The Program shows that to him, there was so much spiritual truth to his ‘movie’ – Lance Armstrong, inspirational hero to the masses! – that he couldn’t bring himself to stop playing the role.
At the centre of The Program is Foster’s tersely magnetic performance as the shrewd, furious, guarded Lance, a man who has shed himself of everything but competition and will. Foster’s eyes are darts of cunning, and his bow lips pucker with calculation. There’s an extraordinary scene in which Lance practices, saying “I have never tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs” in front of a mirror, and Foster, right there, lays bare the eerie psychology of a master liar: it’s not just acting the part – its believing your own lie. The movie is full of pinpoint performances, notably Chris O’Dowd’s wily turn as David Walsh, the journalist who was on to Armstrong from the start and helped bring the story out into the open by sparring with him at news conferences.
The Program isn’t what I would call a moving film. It’s too coolly objective, and too honest to make a likable hero out of Armstrong. Yet it connects to the audience in a different way. It says that we all wanted – way too much – for Armstrong to be who he appeared to be. He couldn’t bring himself to pull the plug on that movie, because we couldn’t stop watching it.