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THE PROGRAM. Directed by Stephen Frears, with Ben Foster.
REVIEW: Leslie Felperin
THE disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong’s rise and fall are ploddingly chronicled in The Program, director Stephen Frears’ latest foray into docudrama. The film is centred around the figure of Armstrong, an egomaniacal Lycra-clad cheat played with a tiresome lack of nuance by Ben Foster.
Unable or unwilling to probe Armstrong’s psychology in any depth, surely the point of a fact-based drama, The Program becomes just a glib rehash of old news that brings the story up to date, not mentioning for instance in the final subtitles that Armstrong is being sued by his former sponsors, the US Postal Service. Ultimately, the core issues that make Armstrong’s story so compelling – drugging in sports, institutional corruption, the destructive nature of competitiveness, the debasing influence of celebrity – are only superficially explored, making this a disappointment on nearly every level.
Eschewing an opportunity to explore Armstrong’s early life, the story picks up in 1993 for Armstrong’s first Tour de France and first interview with Sunday Times sports journalist David Walsh (Chris O’Dowd) whose book Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong formed the inspiration for John Hodge’s screenplay. Even during this first encounter, Armstrong cheats, or at least shows ruthless gamesmanship in a simple game of bar room fussball.
All the same, the easygoing Walsh doesn’t take him seriously as any kind of major player in cycling, dismissing him in explicatory dialogue with colleagues as merely a good day racer, lacking the physique for the gruelling mountain climbs of the Tour. Armstrong knows it too, and after finishing over 80 places behind the yellow jersey, he’s soon talking team-mates into buying performance enhancer EPO in Switzerland where pharmacists sell it over the counter.
The rest is one long downhill slide into infamy. Step by step, the script revisits the known facts of the story: how Armstrong battled cancer, how in hospital he discussed his use of performance-enhancing drugs casually in a conversation with his doctor which team mate Frankie Andreu’s wife Betsy (Elaine Cassidy) overheard and later revealed to Walsh, and how once he went into remission he became an unstoppable cycling machine with the help of shady sports doctor Dr. Ferrari (Guillaume Canet). Eventually, enabled by team manager Johan Bruyneel (Denis Menochet), agent Bill Stapleton (Lee Pace), and the tacit collusion of the cycling authorities, Armstrong would become the drug kingpin of the team, helping his all-too-willing team mates to dope.
What the film does best is to get across the very banality of cheating in the sport, with drug use so endemic evading getting caught becomes part of the game itself.
The cycling sequences are dynamically shot by Danny Cohen, while soundtrack choices underscore the period and add a bit of bounce. – Reuters/ Hollywood Reporter