The Armstrong Lie (15.)
Directed by Alex Gibney.
Featuring Lance Armstrong, Frankie Andreu, Betty Andreu, Johan Bruyneel, Michel Ferrari and David Walsh. 123 mins
In the end of year round-ups Wikileaks drama The Fifth Estate was declared to be 2013’s biggest movie flop (based on box office gross as a percentage of the budget.) I wonder if that was at least partly due to Alex Gibney’s comprehensive documentary on the same subject taking the wind from its sails. We shall see if his Lance Armstrong documentary has any impact on the forthcoming Stephen Frears’s Armstrong biopic with Ben Foster.
In the slippery and opportunistic world of documentary film making Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side, Mea Maxima Culpa) stands out as a figure of calm authority, one who will deliver the facts in a clear and balanced way and not have you second guessing if you can believe what you are seeing. His Lance Armstrong film though is a patched up and make do effort, as well as being an admission of being had.
In 2009, four years after retiring from cycling having won his seventh Tour De France, Armstrong returned to the sport to try and win it one more time and Gibney was employed by producer Frank Marshall (Spielberg’s right hand man) to document the comeback. In 2011 the film was all but finished when the accusations and evidence of his drug taking became overwhelming and the game was finally up. This new film is built on the foundations of the old one, which isn’t a bad structure for an Armstrong expose. In Scooby Doo terms, he would’ve gotten away with it if it hadn’t been for the comeback. Gibney has augmented the 2009 footage with interviews with all the leading figures including a new, post Oprah, one with Armstrong.
The irony of it all is that his comeback seems to have been motivated by a desire to win the Tour clean. The film is unclear as to whether Armstrong really was entirely clean in 2009 but the man who beat him, Alberto Contador, in that Tour was stripped of his victory in the following year’s Tour after testing positive for banned substances. There’s a reason why it’s called The Armstrong Lie rather than Conspiracy or Con. Cheating in a sport where everybody does wasn’t so reprehensible, but the bullying and ruthlessness with which he enforced that lie surely was.
Maybe so, but I think that the film doesn’t have the force of other Gibney films because ultimately none of it really matters. Armstrong comes across as an arrogant, snide, spiteful, sanctimonious and self-righteous egotist, but in my experience that could be said of just about everybody who cycles on a regular basis.
Directed by Alex Gibney.
Featuring Lance Armstrong, Frankie Andreu, Betty Andreu, Johan Bruyneel, Michel Ferrari and David Walsh. 123 mins
In the end of year round-ups Wikileaks drama The Fifth Estate was declared to be 2013’s biggest movie flop (based on box office gross as a percentage of the budget.) I wonder if that was at least partly due to Alex Gibney’s comprehensive documentary on the same subject taking the wind from its sails. We shall see if his Lance Armstrong documentary has any impact on the forthcoming Stephen Frears’s Armstrong biopic with Ben Foster.
In the slippery and opportunistic world of documentary film making Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side, Mea Maxima Culpa) stands out as a figure of calm authority, one who will deliver the facts in a clear and balanced way and not have you second guessing if you can believe what you are seeing. His Lance Armstrong film though is a patched up and make do effort, as well as being an admission of being had.
In 2009, four years after retiring from cycling having won his seventh Tour De France, Armstrong returned to the sport to try and win it one more time and Gibney was employed by producer Frank Marshall (Spielberg’s right hand man) to document the comeback. In 2011 the film was all but finished when the accusations and evidence of his drug taking became overwhelming and the game was finally up. This new film is built on the foundations of the old one, which isn’t a bad structure for an Armstrong expose. In Scooby Doo terms, he would’ve gotten away with it if it hadn’t been for the comeback. Gibney has augmented the 2009 footage with interviews with all the leading figures including a new, post Oprah, one with Armstrong.
The irony of it all is that his comeback seems to have been motivated by a desire to win the Tour clean. The film is unclear as to whether Armstrong really was entirely clean in 2009 but the man who beat him, Alberto Contador, in that Tour was stripped of his victory in the following year’s Tour after testing positive for banned substances. There’s a reason why it’s called The Armstrong Lie rather than Conspiracy or Con. Cheating in a sport where everybody does wasn’t so reprehensible, but the bullying and ruthlessness with which he enforced that lie surely was.
Maybe so, but I think that the film doesn’t have the force of other Gibney films because ultimately none of it really matters. Armstrong comes across as an arrogant, snide, spiteful, sanctimonious and self-righteous egotist, but in my experience that could be said of just about everybody who cycles on a regular basis.
