A movie about the life of Lance Armstrong was inevitable. Even before his major fall from grace, in which his prolific and unparalleled competitive cycling career was revealed to be the result of a comprehensive doping scheme, his story was pure Oscar bait. Cancer survivor, heroic athlete, benevolent philanthropist—all of it fodder for a big, inspirational prestige picture. The ugly and highly public downfall was just the icing on the cake. So the fact that The Program exists isn’t at all that surprising. The film, a biopic about Armstrong that covers all the aforementioned ground, sort of feels like it’s been with us all along; so public and dramatic were the real events that unfolded. Needless to say, director Stephen Frears (Philomena, High Fidelity) had his work cut out for him; he made a film we knew was coming, so what, if anything, could he do to surprise us?
Docudramas about famous and controversial figures tend to feel the same. Regardless of who’s under the microscope—troubled artists, self-destructive musicians, defamed politicians—one often sees the same tidy survey. The highs and lows are charted with apt drama and we’re left with an appropriate, if preprogrammed, sense of who the person was and how we should feel about them. For the most part, The Program is no exception. Frears sticks to the generally accepted narrative—Armstrong (Ben Foster) is a promising if modestly skilled cyclist whose career is derailed when he’s diagnosed with stage-three testicular cancer. He beats the unlikely odds of survival and is determined to never experience another setback, so he and his teammates use performance enhancing drugs and start winning like crazy, which draws the suspicion of skeptical journalist David Walsh (Chris O’Dowd), who proceeds to blow the whole thing open—and the film ends with the widely held notion that Armstrong is a major jerk but hey, cancer is scary and everybody wants to succeed in life, so let’s all just try to be more humble and honest with ourselves and each other.
You don’t typically learn a lot when you watch a biopic. Mostly, the events you’ve read or heard about are simply dramatized onscreen, usually without any kind of re-contextualization. The Program flips the script a little. Frears, it seems, was less interested in showing us something new about Armstrong and more interested in showing us something new about the biopic. He and screenwriter John Hodge hurry through the first act, trimming down and outright skipping major events in Armstrong’s life—in other words, the kind of stuff you usually see in a biopic—in order to show us how he won the Tour de France an unprecedented seven times in a row. Here, Frears slows the action down considerably, focusing on the program, as it were, that Armstrong and his team used to administer and hide their use of performance enhancing drugs.
Frears shows us how comprehensive and clever the process was, but focuses just as much on the more crude and brutal aspects, wrapping both sides up in an intriguingly contradictory package. Hypodermic needles are hidden in discarded cans of sparkling water and tossed in the trash by an assistant; meanwhile, Armstrong and company have packets of clean blood at the ready, which they swap with their doped blood whenever an official comes around then subsequently switch back in when it’s time to race. The whole thing looks and feels disturbing; not only do the scenes that show the team shooting up look like they belong in a drama about junkies, others look like they belong in some kind of body horror film, with figures splayed across hotel rooms as they willingly offer vats and vats of their own blood. Armstrong, of course, is the ringleader in all of this, and Foster’s performance, though certainly over-the-top, has a self-aware quality that underlines the absurdity of such a desperate situation.
What comes through most is a feeling of anguish. Like Armstrong himself, The Program is an intense and drastic movie, and the symbiosis between form and subject is exhilarating. Frears’ agreeable style wouldn’t seem to gel with a contentious persona like Armstrong’s, and quite often it doesn’t, but in a film rife with conflict, the rift between the humanist director and the pessimistic material is the one that sings loudest. You can tell Frears wants to give Armstrong the same fair shake he’s given his other protagonists, but he crucially does not shy away from the stuff that kind of makes the guy a monster. (At one point, he even equates Armstrong with a monster: The scene between him and the doctor that starts him on PEDs is akin to Frankenstein and his creation.) Frears is so distracted by his feelings that he bumbles the denouement, a mix archival footage and the same rushed storytelling from the film’s beginning that doesn’t provide a narrative conclusion so much as an abrupt stopping point. The film is over, but we get a sense that the story isn’t, and whether that story is Armstrong’s or Frears’ is left maddeningly unanswered.