Review: THE PROGRAM Portrays Lance Armstrong As A Fascinating Liar
British filmmaker Stephen Frears is no stranger to bringing a controversial and highly publicized real life case to the big screen. With both The Queen and The Program, Frears explores how much the reality of an influential figure can differ from the public opinion.
In this film, in particular, notorious cyclist Lance Armstrong (portrayed by Ben Foster) is presented as an athlete with a very unique mentality, almost impossible to assimilate. Hence this is a peculiar sports movie though on the surface, Armstrong is nothing but a perfect underdog character, one that’s essential to any story about the human spirit overcoming all adversities.
The variation in Frears’ film is that it makes the “underdog becoming world champion” linear narrative part of an escapist notion right from the beginning. The Program make us face the fact that the lovable idea of an athlete achieving incredible things, and getting worldwide acclaim, might just be as corrupted as almost everything else in the real world.
There’s no hesitation in The Program; Armstrong learns quite soon that, based on his physical condition, the future he has in professional cycling is not bright at all. This is before the testicular cancer diagnosis, which really comes unexpectedly to a cyclist already using prohibited substances to improve his performances. Armstrong overcoming the deadly decease will eventually become the perfect background for one of the greatest sports stories we have seen in our lifetime: an all American cyclist winning the Tour de France in seven consecutive occasions, and at the same time supporting ill persons through his nonprofit foundation.
Much like in The Queen, Frears uses some of the film’s archival footage to expose the average folk’s vision towards the respective public figure; curiously enough, in The Program the real life footage, with people loving Armstrong, is the consequence of the lie, while the dramatization - starring such actors as Foster, Chris O’Dowd and Jesse Plemons -, comes straight from David Walsh’s journalistic work that evolved into the Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong book.
In this sports flick the biggest tournaments are increasingly irrelevant, not just because the outcome is known but really since we always see them as part of the fraud. The conflict is quite fascinating, as Armstrong evolves into a villain in order to preserve both his integrity and the notion of the “ultimate champion” that (almost) everybody loves - including the Tour de France organizers but not bold journalist David Walsh -, because they all are benefited from it. Armstrong becomes the bully that literally threatens those colleagues that have more integrity yet less power than him in the industry; he is also the leader of an organized network that even goes as far as to learn the process to avoid the blood of a teammate to test positive in drug tests.
If Armstrong went all the way with his lie, then Frears is doing the same in order to portray him as a dishonest person. The finest example of this comes from a couple of scenes involving Armstrong while he acts for some commercials; if the athlete recommends on television a certain kind of cereal, then the next shot is that of Armstrong disliking the taste of said cereal once the cameras stop recording. Is this exaggerated? Absolutely, but is part of The Program’s intention of exploring sports as part of the show business.
The Program is definitely not interested in tackling more of Armstrong’s life aside of the lie he built over the years. It works as a simple confrontation of this increasing force and the few people that tried to uncover him.
