The Program and Crimson Peak

It is true that a film could not have been made about any other cyclist. Cycling could not have been less attractive before Armstrong turned up, a niche world peopled by stunted trolls in too-tight shorts. Fortunately, the director Stephen Frears has lovingly re-created this world, including a spectacularly furtive amoeba in the shape of the ferrety Italian doctor Michele Ferrari (Guillaume Canet), who first appears encased in a hideous shell suit, tinted glasses strapped to his face. I don’t think I could have come up with a more superbly repellent villain than “the Pope of Dope” without turning this into a film about football. Ferrari is a chemical obsessive interested only in the pure science of creating the most efficient cyclist in history.

Foster plays Armstrong as a moral blank spot, a man so traduced by his terrible brush with testicular cancer, he doesn’t care who he tramples or hurts. He runs, quite literally, on poison. He is pumped full of chemotherapy drugs before he is pumped full of performance-enhancing drugs by Ferrari. I could probably have taken more detail on the Jacobean intricacies of doping — the grotesque in-caravan blood transfusions, how Armstrong got the drugs from one place to another. But this is a polite and tasteful film, unwilling to show pints of urine or drained blood sacs.

Frears buys heavily into the romance of cycling, the sweeping hills, the pounding thighs. A documentary made by Alex Gibney two years ago was less squeamish, presenting a far more explicit and complex analysis of a vicious, messianic man who thought he owed the world nothing. The Program presents the virtually hairless Texan more prissily, as a man who is simply angry at having cancer. Foster is shown yellow, liverish, painfully thin, rigged up to drips, stumbling around hospital corridors moaning: “I’m a world champion.”

But he recovers and wins his Tours de France, earns hundreds of millions of dollars and sets up a cancer charity dedicated to massaging his vast ego. More importantly, he turns a sport with the sex appeal of the Littlehampton bowling club into a hotbed of backstabbings and slanging matches. It makes for some satisfyingly tense moments.

There are odd casting decisions, though. I don’t think I’ve ever come across a tall Irish cycling journalist, but here is Chris O’Dowd, 6ft 3in, as David Walsh, the Sunday Times reporter who chased Armstrong for 13 years, and on whose book the film is based. O’Dowd is neither the right height nor the right age (there is a strange scene with far too many children for a man of O’Dowd’s age at dinner) nor the right temperament to portray the ratlike shrewdness of a top journalist.

Foster, though, delivers a strong and convincing performance, and I could watch films about Armstrong and his evil machinations for ever. This one may fail to unearth many of his mysteries, but it is a confident, if understated, offering.

From one terrible monster to another. I had high hopes for Crimson Peak, a luscious thriller created by Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy), but what a prancing big mess it turned out to be. Del Toro has apparently drawn on horror movies of the 1930s, horror movies of the 1960s, Jane Eyre, Jane Austen, horror movies of the 1970s and 1980s, insects, The Age of Innocence and people called Mary.

In fact, I don’t think there’s a single horror movie he hasn’t been inspired by, including the worst horror comedy ever made, The Haunted Mansion, a fantasy based on a ride at Disneyland, starring Eddie Murphy as a real estate developer. Del Toro even seems to have used the house Murphy visited in The Haunted Mansion, a crumbling pile in a part of Edwardian England. It is a ridiculous painted wilderness that looks unremittingly like the inside of a studio.

The house is not the only thing that defies taste and logic. Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) is New York’s least convincing aspiring novelist, a pile of idiot curls in glasses who falls in love with the owner of the house, Sir Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston). She is dazzled by the pale young man, unperturbed by the fact that he offers her a business card showing his title (so naff), also unperturbed by the fact that his sister, Lady Lucille Sharpe (Jessica Chastain), looks like a Russell Brand-themed prostitute. Edith allows herself to be transported to the house, which is built on red clay, clay that oozes up from underneath the floorboards, looking like blood. Do you think she’s got it, yet?

The answer is a resounding no. Edith is told never to take the service lift down to the basement — she therefore spends the next two hours rattling up and down in one of her many event nightdresses. By slightly closing my eyes (or not closing my eyes at all), it was easy to imagine the entire thing was acted by curtains. Wasikowska’s Edith has the emotional range of a pelmet.

At this point of the review, I might like to place Crimson Peak in some kind of cultural context, give some finely formed critical nuggets. Only this seems impossible, as it shamelessly references nearly every artistic event of the past two centuries. “Ghosts are a metaphor for the past,” breathes Edith, but it turns out everything is actually a metaphor for everything. Teacups, cobwebs, top hats, butterflies, breakfast, candlesticks, letters, porridge and the waltz all represent, variously, sex and/or death. Crimson Peak really is the bastard child of Francis Ford Coppola’s execrable Dracula.

About halfway through, I watched Wasikowska do something truly horrifying: moving her face and dropping a stale tear. I think she was trying to act, something Hiddleston and Chastain wisely refuse to do. On top of all the terrible costumes, the possessed wheelchairs, the frowning portraits and buckets of blood, there’s no need for any extra effort at all.

The Program
15, 103 mins

Crimson Peak
15, 119 mins

@camillalong