THE PROGRAM: A Racing Drama That Doesn’t Know When To Stop

I’m a big fan of a well-made sports biopic. Not being very athletic myself but fascinated with the world of sports science and laws of probability, I find I have a great interest in ‘the field’. That is why I was very excited to see that a biopic was being made of Lance Armstrong’s doping scandal and much heralded fall from grace. Furthermore, I had seen Ben Foster as William S. Burroughs in Kill Your Darlings and was keen to see him play another real person; the fact that Chris O’Dowd and Lee Pace would also be co-starring was a delightful bonus. But while it is an entertaining film and there is clearly a lot to be learned from The Program, I can’t help but feel it fell short of would it could have been.

Too Much Information

Like a good political drama (All The President’s Men, anyone?) a good sports biopic can grip and entertain the audience through telling as much of the story and using as many of the real facts as possible. Based on David Walsh’s book Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit Of Lance Armstrong, Stephen Frears’ film tells the story of Armstrong’s career in the Tour de France alongside David Walsh’s (played by Chris O’ Dowd in the film) attempts to uncover suspected drug use by the athlete.

I found it refreshing that the film included so much information and attempted to fit the length of Armstrong’s career into one film. However, this adherence to depicting over a decade of a life on film means that a lot of facts and events get thrown out. Understandably, Frears and screenwriter John Hodge knew there would be many areas of Armstrong’s life that the audience would already be familiar with. But, unfortunately, they shed one too many important points.

Within the film’s first ten minutes, Armstrong falls sick (with testicular cancer). Seemingly, with no one supporting him and after an all-too-brief stay in hospital, he’s out and raring to get back in the saddle. Within weeks, it would seem, of him recovering he is at the door of noted doping doctor Michele Ferrari. While all this exposition within minutes of the film’s opening gets us to the crux of the story quicker, it glosses over the most important mystery of all: Why did Lance Armstrong begin doping?

From what the film tells us, we can assume that he doesn’t really seem to see doping as cheating. Maybe because of the amount of drugs he took while suffering from cancer? Which subverted his idea about their use? Maybe because a lot of the drugs he used can (in smaller doses) be found naturally in the human body? The film never really answers this question or investigates whether he ever felt any guilt about it. I wonder if this is because Armstrong honestly believed he did nothing wrong, or whether it’s just that the filmmakers were unconcerned with the ‘why?’.

Not Enough Drama

While the film does away with many important questions and facts in order to get as much of the story into the film (Armstrong gets married, and divorced, incredibly quickly), the most important aspect lost on its way to complete exposition is drama.

Ben Foster is a superb actor and gives an incredible performance of Armstrong. Despite the obvious physical work he has put into the role, he has made a concerted effort to convey Armstrong’s cold intimidation, and he is unnerving to watch. Furthermore, Guillaume Canet (as Michele Ferrari), Chris O’Dowd (David Walsh) and Lee Pace (as Armstrong’s sports agent Bill Stapleton) are all equally brilliant. Canet as Ferrari, like Foster as Armstrong, is arrogant and controlled, seeming not to acknowledge the damage he has done. While not having such extreme characterisation, O’Dowd and Pace’s performances equally live up to the film’s atmosphere of confusion and intimidation. Unusually, though, it is because of this great acting that the film’s shortcomings become that more obvious.

When we get to see these men act, they are incredible. When Walsh, in the press room, seemingly acknowledges that Armstrong is up to something, you can see the weight rest on Chris O’Dowd’s face. A weight that tells of a man who has realised that something is wrong and he, alone, is going to have to fight to prove it (it’s an excellent piece of acting by O’Dowd). When Armstrong practises his lines before a press conference, you can see the cold calculation in Foster’s eyes. Perhaps the most superb scene of the film is when Walsh meets with Armstrong, and Stapleton sits in on the interview with them. Pace, placing that dictaphone on the table, is perhaps the most perfect moment of this or many other films like it.

The problem? Well, the film is so fixated on moving through every single moment of Armstrong’s life that these actors are never given a chance to breathe. Despite the obvious skimming over of important moments, we never really learn about Ferrari’s point of view or understand how difficult life must have been for David Walsh. While Jesse Plemons as Floyd Landis is superb, and pivotal in Armstrong’s downfall, I feel that the film becomes unnecessarily distracted by his narrative.

No doubt, the quality is here, but the film’s duration has been given over to quantity; and therein lies its downfall. It could have been an amazing film, but its dedication to facts and events (many of which are ignored anyway) means all the space usually given over to drama in a film such as this is lost.

The Reality Of The Situation

I had a basic understanding of Armstrong’s career before I saw The Program and what struck me more than anything in this film was that it was unclear what the boundaries were when it came to the all important doping. I knew something about blood doping but was unsure of what else Armstrong had been involved in, and what would happen to those cyclists who were caught. To be fair, the impression I get from the film is that it is so large a grey area (as previously mentioned, a lot of these chemicals can be found naturally in the human body), that perhaps there is no right or wrong, and the cyclists and their teams exploited that fact? But I would have appreciated a clarification.

To better understand The Program I asked a friend, a former road racing cyclist who has read every single book on Lance Armstrong, what he thought of the film. While his former colleagues took umbrage with what was left out of the narrative, he was quite pleased with it, although admittedly he found that there are documentaries which told the story much better. As if to add credence to the superb work of the actors in this film it would also appear that they were perfectly cast and performed their roles well, with Guillaume Canet as Ferrari and Jesse Plemons as Floyd Landis being particular highlights.

While it would seem that the film more or less conveyed the accuracy of the situation (we may never know what was actually happening in Armstrong’s mind at this time), there are aspects of the production I was displeased with. I was once told by the makeup artist Morag Ross that if you can see the makeup, it hasn’t been done right. Unfortunately, to make people look old or ill etc., the makeup in The Program is glaringly obvious and distracts from the acting. Some poor special effects, especially at the end of the Tour de France, only adds to this distraction. That being said, there is some excellent editing between stock footage of Armstrong and Foster, which speaks highly of the work of cinematographer Danny Cohen.

Conclusion

The Program is a very good sports biopic; it tells the story well and the acting is superb. While it skips over many aspects of Armstrong’s life and is all too brisk in its telling, as an audience member you really do feel like you get the whole story. The film never asks you to sympathise with Armstrong, but doesn’t want you to see him as all bad either. So you’re left with the feeling that Walsh and Frears aren’t out to slander him, but to simply tell the story.

All that being said, I felt the film really fell down. By skimming over the drama, it missed out on exploring the feelings of the people involved. Furthermore, by being too fixated on the sheer amount of lies told, The Program fails to ask why these people did what they did, turning what could have been an intense psychological game of a story into a run-of-the-mill sports movie.

Have you seen The Program? What did you think? How does it compare to documentaries that you have seen about Lance Armstrong?

The Program is still on release in the UK but has yet to be given a US release date. For more information on international release dates see here.

(top image source: StudioCanal)