The Armstrong Lie, 2013, Sony Pictures Classics. Directed by Alex
Gibney, starring Lance Armstrong, Reed Albergotti, Frankie Andreu.
In 2013, Lance Armstrong admitted
to sport’s worst kept secret, coming clean about his use of performance
enhancing drugs throughout his career. His sponsors fled, his titles were
stripped from him and he’s currently being sued for $100 million for fraud. To
be sure, being Lance Armstrong now doesn’t seem like fun, but in Alex Gibney’s
hastily re-edited documentary, he didn’t seem to mind too much.
Alex Gibney was originally
drafted in to film Armstrong’s triumphant comeback to the Tour De France in
2009, after winning it seven times from 1999 to 2005. His story of cancer,
heartache and honest hard work was a fairytale – many believed that to be
exactly the case. Knowing what we do now, it’s hard to look at the masses of
fans cheering Armstrong on as a hero and realise that he lied, cheated and
bullied his way to the top. The documentary doesn’t shirk the difficult task of
showing Armstrong as a maligned angel to his public and a candid drug user in private;
one of his US Postal Service teammates recalled a time when Armstrong openly
gave himself a shot of EPO right in their hotel room.
And then there’s Armstrong’s
utter refusal to say sorry. The film feels like it’s building to a climax of
regret and retribution, but neither is fore coming. Clearly, Armstrong wished
he never came back in 2009 (which opened a renewed interest in a second look at
his sketchy past) because he got caught out. But he never really said sorry to
the people he’d sued and destroyed to protect his reputation. One teammate said
of Armstrong’s achievements, ‘Did he win by the rules of the road? Yes. But did
he win by the rules? No.’ Armstrong still maintains that he didn’t cheat and
that history will say he won the Tour seven times.
This kind of belligerence makes
for a difficult subject of what was originally meant to be a soft and inspiring
film about Armstrong’s need to cycle ridiculous distances in France. The actual
Tour itself looks fun and exciting, and there is a small thrill in hearing the
other teams worry themselves over the Sir Bradley Wiggins threat (whose own
documentary, A Year in Yellow, was presumably everything this one wanted to be
but couldn’t) but it’s still overshadowed by its most well known participant’s
blatant drug use. Gibney himself sounds constantly dejected, speaking of when
he was caught up in the Armstrong Myth in the 2009 Tour and then immediately reminding
his audience that this man still cheated everyone. It goes against every
narrative urge for a sports documentary - no one ever beats the odds by cheating,
that would be heartbreakingly realistic! The incredible story turned out to be
just that, and at times this film feels more like a Werner Herzog piece than
anything else.
This film has no villain;
Armstrong refuses to see himself as such and Gibney doesn’t push that angle. It’s
also strangely structured, leaping back and forth between events and swallowing
stories to spit them back out later. Armstrong is cool and collected – his interview
after the Oprah interview should have been the point in the narrative where he
let his mask slip and shown what he was truly feeling, but there was no sense
of a human being with a beating heart in any of his interviews for this film.
Ultimately, Armstrong seems like an unpleasant person who won’t say sorry. The Armstrong Lie is a nihilistic film but it
is refreshing in the way that there’s no way a sport can sink any lower than
cycling in 2013. And with Team Sky taking on the world, the Tour de France may just have some heroes worth celebrating.
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