The Program – Film Review by Stephen McDermott

Director: Stephen Frears
Writers: John Hodge (screenplay), David Walsh (book)
Stars: Jesse Plemons, Lee Pace, Ben Foster

Hindsight makes it easy to say how amazing it is the world didn’t see through Lance Armstrong sooner. After all, the evidence was staring everyone right in the face.

Indeed, one of The Program’s more memorable scenes sees David Walsh (Chris O’Dowd) make an early case against the now disgraced Tour de France winner to his fellow journalists.

How, only a year after the 1998 Festina doping scandal, was Armstrong able to record an even faster average Tour pace if the Tour was now clean? What explained the fact that Armstrong was so liberally applying his brakes going uphill in the toughest mountain stages of the Tour? And most importantly, why was nobody else obsessed with the evidence in front of them?

It’s an aspect of the story that’s handled by Stephen Frears incredibly well. Armstrong and his U.S. Postal team may have instigated the cover-up, but most of the public were complicit in it. The world simply wanted to believe, and Walsh was spoiling the party.

Adapted by John Hodge from Walsh’s book Seven Deadly Sins, The Program details the extent of Armstrong’s doping and Walsh’s twelve-year quest to uncover the truth. But while the book is told from Walsh’s perspective, the film’s narrative isn’t told from his point of view and we’re also given an insight into Armstrong’s early career and cancer comeback.

At the same time, the film does well not to stray into the realm of unnecessary character-sketching, which would be easy given the nature of Armstrong’s aesculapian rags-to-riches tale. The lives and relationships between the characters are almost exclusively professional, with Frears allowing the doping narrative to do the work on its own.

He’s helped by some strong performances throughout, with Ben Foster playing a frightening likeness of the increasingly-sociopathic Armstrong, and O’Dowd proving he can play a serious lead just as excellently as a comic one. Even Dustin Hoffman shows up to turn in a shift as prize promoter Bob Hamann, while Jesse Plemons is excellent as Floyd Landis.

It’s a little unfortunate that in charting Walsh’s attempt to bring his doing to light, The Program falls a short when Armstrong’s cover is finally blown. There’s no real balance between the meteoric nature of Armstrong’s rise and his ultimate fall, something which arrives almost as a footnote. In fact, Walsh seems to disappear from the scene entirely in the film’s final scenes: it’s a bit more peloton than yellow jersey, so to speak.

Ultimately though, there’s enough in The Program to satisfy those with even just a passing knowledge of Armstrong’s story. It remains to be seen whether the film’s overall lack of context will stand the test of time, but as an account of one of this century’s biggest sporting scandals goes, it’s still pretty dope.