“Hollywood is going to make a film of his life” – a line that was used part-way through The Program, the fictional film about the real-life story of Lance Armstrong cheating his way through seven Tour de France championships titles. And so true are the words, they did, but I doubt this was the film Armstrong envisioned they’d make.
The Program begins with a fresh-faced Ben Foster as the then young buck Armstrong hitting the Tour de France for the very first time. He’s playing on a foosball table with David Walsh (Chris O’Dowd), a sports journalist who sees all the promise in the world in Armstrong as a one-day racer, but not as a serious challenger for the Tour de France. Walsh, it appears, is right. Armstrong didn’t have what it took, but disgruntled with the idea that 3 members of the same team would hold the top 3 spots, he claims doping. Though, instead of doing anything about it, he goes to the man he thinks responsible, Michele Ferrari (Guillaume Canet) and asks to join his ‘program’ (hello, film title). Ferrari tells Armstrong he’s just too big for a ride and then of course he’s struck down with his cancer diagnoses. After making a remarkable recovery from the illness to come back to the sport, well, the rest as we know it, is history.
The Program is a bitter pill to swallow, and not for the fact Armstrong cheated for all those years, that part is understandably heinous. The Program‘s big issue is for such a huge story, for such a controversial time in the sport of Cycling, it’s all just a bit flat. It’s very damming of Lance Armstrong, he’s narcissistic, manipulative, a bully, but that message begins to grate away at you halfway through the film. The story seems to follow a blueprint from the documentary The Armstrong Lie, to which it is tied very closely to. Lance Armstrong is an unredeemable, unforgivable human being, and that’s all The Program really ever says. It fleetingly touches on Armstrong’s battle and survival of cancer, because to dwell too much on that would garner too much sympathy for him, and this film is about how the evil Lance Armstrong unapologetically fooled us all (he did), but that just gets a bit boring after a while. The Program never really settles, it never really looks at one particular moment under a microscope, instead choosing to rush by everything. It would have been nice if writer John Hodge or director Stephen Frears had slowed it down a bit so we could have taken a deeper look at the story. Ultimately, it leaves the film feeling a little one dimensional.
As far as the portrayal goes, Ben Foster certainly looks the part, but it’s clear that the blueprint was Lance Armstrong is the evil villain and there is very little redeemable qualities about him. Foster is good, very good, but his portrayal of Armstrong comes somewhere between an outright sociopath and just a cheesy mobster boss at times, having everyone at his mercy as his pulls all the strings. It really isn’t to take away from Foster’s performance which should be lauded, it’s yet another criticism on a biasly written film.
Is The Program worth watching? Absolutely. It’s interesting to see the history regardless of how it comes across, though this one is just a tad one-sided and another telling of these events in the future may be welcomed.
The Program is now available on digital download and DVD/Blu-Ray.
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