Lance Armstrong is a big fat liar. We know this. Thanks to the 2013 interview with Oprah Winfrey, thanks to the 2012 report from the US Anti-Doping Agency (which found him guilty of orchestrating the most “successful doping program that sport has ever seen”), and mostly thanks to the epic and unrelenting investigative work of the Sunday Times journalist David Walsh (who challenged the Armstrong myth when nobody else would), we know that Armstrong, for the largest part of his professional career, was lying. Lying to journalists, lying to sponsors, to cycling authorities, cycling fans and non-cycling friends alike. In short, his pants were very much on fire.
For the makers of the Armstrong drama and awards season contender, The Program, this presents a troubling conundrum: how to build a compelling narrative around a slippery, evasive and increasingly unlikeable central character whose ignominious fall is already known around the globe and, indeed, has been extensively charted in recent feature-length documentaries such as The Armstrong Lie and Stop at Nothing: The Lance Armstrong Story.
The solution, devised by the prestige team of the director Stephen Frears (The Queen) and the writer John Hodge (Trainspotting), is to enter the realm of the investigative thriller, and to transform the tale into a battle of wills between the megalomaniacal sports star and the one journalist, Walsh, determined to uncover the truth (the script is based on Walsh’s tome Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong).
The shift of emphasis proves an ingenious move and allows Armstrong — played with terrifying intensity by Ben Foster — the room to breathe as a character. Throughout the movie we repeatedly cut away from the familiar Armstrong bullet points (cyclist, cancer sufferer, cancer survivor, winner, cheat) to the trials of Walsh (Chris O’Dowd), in dogged pursuit, in editorial clashes, and slowly and painstakingly building a case for honesty.
Even more important, Frears and Hodge (and Foster) clearly have no interest in demonising Armstrong, or in force-feeding their audience with satisfying moral certainties. Instead, they depict Armstrong’s 1996 cancer trauma in unforgiving detail, and his agonising recovery equally so. A single tragic scene, for instance, of the post-chemo Armstrong, struggling to stay on his bicycle, emaciated, wan and hairless, yet determined to tackle a relatively inoffensive incline, seems to assault the sensitive viewer with the challenge: “Go on! I dare you! Judge him now!”
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Elsewhere the nudges towards relativism (we are reminded of the money that Armstrong has raised for cancer research — half a billion dollars so far) are neatly balanced with some piquant prose, including an incisive line that quotes the real Walsh: “I have no interest in going up a mountain to watch chemists compete.” And if, in the end, Armstrong remains a curiously elusive figure, deeply objectionable but not entirely reviled, it is partly because the Armstrong case is not wholly closed (many of the lies have yet to be addressed). However, mostly it’s because The Program is a movie made by grown-ups, for an audience of grown-ups, with grown-up uncertainties in mind.
Stephen Frears, 15, 103mins