Cast: Ben Foster, Chris O'Dowd, Guillaume Canet, Jesse Plemons, Lee Pace, Denis Ménochet, Dustin Hoffman

Director: Stephen Frears

Production:Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Tracey Seaward, Kate Solomon.

Written by: John Hodge

Genre: Sports

Duration: 103 Mins *

Ben Foster, a blisteringly good actor when he’s at the top of his game, has Lance Armstrong down to a tee. He has got his cheating number. To describe his performance in The Program as creepy is saying two things. There are moments in it where the spirit of Armstrong, and even his body – that tight mouth with lies coming out of it – seems to animate Foster’s very being.

It’s truly eerie: not only are the actor's face muscles doing things that Armstrong’s have always done, and Foster’s have never done before, but you could frequently swear he’d trained his eyes to move closer together.

It’s also a comment on the creepiness of Armstrong himself, a man who evangelised for the sport of cycling with almost messianic zeal, while defrauding it quite literally from the inside. The two work hand in hand. The more uncanny Foster’s impersonation gets, the more repellent the figure we’re beholding. You just wish the jobbing Stephen Frears assignment around this star turn knew how to whet things to a point, or deliver the story with more novelty and kick.

 

We begin with Armstrong as a nobody, a rank outsider who catches the attention of Sunday Times journalist David Walsh (Chris O’Dowd) only because he looks to have a decent build for day-racing. The 21-day stamina test of the Tour de France looked, at that point, infinitely beyond him. Armstrong’s whole physique was essentially the wrong type to make him a natural champion. John Hodge’s script implies that his bout of testicular cancer was the game-changer, allowing him to redistribute his muscle mass in a near-Frankensteinian feat of reanimation. But still, as we know full well by now, it was not enough.

Prosthetic hair-piece distractingly in place, Guillaume Canet plays Michele Ferrari, the notorious Italian doctor-coach who got Armstrong hooked up on EPO, the performance-enhancing hormone which powered every one of his Tour de France victories. The whole US Postal Service team ended up doing it, and as the improved results nudged them to the top of the pack, they developed sophisticated methods for swapping blood back and forth to outfox the testing officials.

This phase of the film ticks along absorbingly, as we wait for a dangling sword of Damocles to crash down, but there’s a shortage of telling psychological insight at the film’s core. Walsh was the first to smell a rat and launch a print investigation. O’Dowd gives him wily instincts and a frowning air of suspicion – did he dislike being personally duped, or is there even a hint of jealousy in the mix?

 

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