This is a review of The Armstrong Lie (2013)
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1 February
This is a review of The Armstrong Lie (2013)
* Contains spoilers *
One cannot help wondering whether writs (US) or claim forms (England & Wales)* will be flying over Alex Gibney’s film The Armstrong Lie (2013) (which takes its title from the headline of an article in L’Equipe [in English, The Team], ‘Le Mensonge Armstrong’).
The reason is given both by Armstrong’s litigious history, and the fact that, for example, accusations are made (even if made elsewhere before) about the connivance of the governing body’s officials with Armstrong about test-results that should have concerned them (more), the suggestion being that they gave those such as Armstrong a generous chance to come up with an explanation for positive findings : the film not only shows Armstrong presenting the cover-story that he had been prescribed a cream for saddle-sores whose use had caused him to register for steroids, but also how it is claimed, by those working with him, that, after hearing of the problem, they had trawled for a plausible excuse and found one in the cream (after which, presumably, a prescription being made out, as if on the relevant date, was the least of anyone’s worries).
Is though, in fact, the title The Armstrong Lie a partial misnomer, for, at least in part, the film revolves around (but never, maybe, centres on ?) all Armstrong’s denial that he doped, and on how he presented matters in a way favourable to him, as well maintaining the status quo, by such means as suing into submission those who spoke out ? Maybe reprehensible for a sportsman, who seems to have sacrificed friends Frankie and Betsy Andreu to defending his position, but all perfectly normal PR work of seeking to limit damage, one might cynically say, even if it does concern the emotive world of sport and the legendary feat of endurance that is Le Tour.
In fact, one could wager that the handling of what we might cause ‘the issue’ of illegal performance-enhancing drugs and even mid-race blood transfusions is probably textbook for the world of PR, and to place all the blame / responsibility on Armstrong, when, clearly, he had legal and medical advisers and so was not going to be short of the means and nous to employ advisers who could manipulate the media – the truth even – is short sighted. (In fact, as advisers, they would probably have urged on him such likely consequences, if he did not (and did not pay them for helping), as bans and litigation to recover payments that had been made, which the close of the film neutrally uses words on the screen (not, say, Gibney’s voice) to convey to us.
Imagine that this film were on an adjoining screen (as it probably was) to that showing the morally somewhat ambiguous portrayal of the world of the real Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) (or, for that matter, the fraudulent activity of American Hustle (2013), another film recently in this very Screen 3, and which more definitely makes entertainment out of a true story). About Wolf, a presumably responsible critic of the calibre of Peter Bradshaw (writing in The Guardian) wants to say :
The Wolf of Wall Street does not quite have the subtlety and richness of Scorsese's very best work, but what an incredibly exhilarating film: a deafening and sustained howl of depravity.
What is the moral relativism operative here ? The narrative of the exploits of a man (Belfort) who happily sold people with nothing to speak of (other than their savings – and some greed) stock of whose worth he had no concerns to claw his way back after the 1987 crash is being lauded for depravity**. Whereas Armstrong is castigated for what seems like having gone in too deep and with no way back (except that no one seems to have made him go in for the Tour de France again in 2009, when Gibney was making a film about him, a film that, despite / because of Armstrong’s coming third (and what then unfolded), had to be put on hold for four years).
Of course, Lance Armstrong is no Macbeth, but the words of Act 3, Scene 4 of Shakespeare’s play have a certain resonance [Macbeth has just had his friend Banquo killed by men to whom he lied about who had kept them in lowly positions (he claims that it had been Banquo) – what about Armstrong, as we were told, only agreeing to interviews with Frankie Andreu, of all people (see below, following the quoted Tweet), during the 2009 Tour and then making him wait every time as another chilling way of abusing a (former) friendship and rubbing it in Andreu’s face ?) :
[…] I am in blood
Stepp'd in so far, that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er.
In The Armstrong Lie (2013), Alex Gibney himself doesn't know what kind of film he is making, so what chance do we have ? Confusing / long.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 1, 2014
Never mind Andreu, though. Gibney makes it quite clear in his commentary that he was personally affronted at how he felt treated that Armstrong denied doping to him – as if Armstrong were honestly going to do anything else, when he had weathered such storms as The Andreus’ depositions (in front of whom they said that he told the truth about his treatments to the doctor with care of him), and then employed people who did not care what means they used to destroy their credibility (they did not know whether the doctor in the room at the time was male or female, what the room was like, etc.).
On the view that Armstrong was in so deep that he felt / was told that he had to continue denial, damaging testimony is heard in court, and a legal mind for hire will be used to defeat it, so Gibney was not going to be let into the truth. Equally clearly, from what he said, he felt that he should have known, so out of what motive has he made his film ?
As to the quality of the film itself, the best documentaries do not tell a story for effect in a distorted way, even if one acknowledges that they typically have scores of hours of footage to distil into 90 to 120 minutes – ‘a good bit’ simply has to be left out if it does not tell the story, not inserted with a shoe-horn, and it does not help to have too many strands to it. Here, Gibney seems to have been desperate not to lose too many of ‘the good bits’ from what he shot in 2009, before the film was interrupted, and so he has combined them with what came from 2013, but not necessarily to good effect.
Not necessarily, because one often enough cannot tell whether it is from the earlier or the later period that he is showing footage. When it comes to narrating / telling the route to the come-back Tour of 2009, it seems clear enough that Armstrong has had cancer at some point between 2005 (around the time of his seventh win) and the decision to race again. (This seemed to have been the testicular cancer that Armstrong describes ?) But Gibney does not trouble himself, in the structure and content of his film, to distinguish this period of having cancer from an earlier one, which, when one learns of it, makes one doubt whether one might have misunderstood why Armstrong had been out of competition from 2005 to 2009. Wrong-footing the viewer in that way achieves little.
A simple telling of the key facts and dates in Armstrong’s life would certainly have helped. Perhaps not everyone knew very much about Armstrong, so it might have included where and when he was born, because we only went to the footage of Armstrong as a sixteen-year-old in Texas quite a bit later on (when, in the words that head this review, he boasted his competitive and athletic nature)…
Of course, no film need be linear, but there is not a lot of point, for example, in editing one’s film in such a way that the concept of ‘the yellow jersey’ (le maillot jaune) is explained when it has already been introduced once or twice (and, at the time, with the seeming assumption that viewers knew what it meant) : as with editing text, defining something when it is first mentioned is the rule of thumb (unless, of course, one wishes to keep one’s audience waiting for a purpose). As to the substance EPO, perhaps we did not need a structure diagram on the screen or to have spelt out what it stands for (which Michele Ferrari could surely have done), but it was as nebulous as the jersey : eventually, the film told us that Armstrong and others, under Ferrari’s direction, were having injections, but Gibney was not that careful, again, to tell us enough about it before he came to the involvement of Ferrari, when it may have been too late.
How feature films are put together will be quite different, but there will be the same journey, in editing, of finding that a scene ‘does not work’ or has to be put later / earlier than envisaged, and, unless someone is to remain ambiguous as to identity, introduced in such a way that the viewer will remember who he or she is / what his or her name is. Makers of documentaries tend to imagine that, despite what else is going on in the soundtrack or on the screen, it suffices to say in a caption who someone is the first time that we see him or her. However, if I do not know that Bicycling is a magazine, defining the person on the screen in relation to it by its title does not tell me that he or she is a journalist in the field of cycling.
Along with the fact that the caption will only, at most, be visible for the length of the clip, this may not be enough for the audience not to be in doubt that they have seen this person before, but not to recall his or her significance in the story. The point is of general application to documentaries, but also relevant here : a happy medium between giving the person a caption every time (which is overkill), and also bearing in mind how and how frequently voice-over is to be used.
At root, one wonders a little why Gibney came back to this project. Even saying that, three hours after Armstrong’s appearance in interview with Oprah Winfrey, he was in front of Gibney’s equipment (according to a caption). Did he expect something from Gibney, and what did Gibney hope for ? As one could only tell from whether the content had to be pre- or post-Oprah, it was hard to place when Gibney had filmed him, and this constituted another part of the cloudiness of the story-telling – nothing against a story that throws out clues that cohere to explain something at 40 minutes in that was unclear after only 10, but this did not have the air of being that sort of film-making : it just was unclear what Armstrong said to Gibney, or did not say, three hours after appearing on t.v.
The film did have (thanks to Ben Bloodwell’s work) astonishingly beautiful ways of photographing cycling, whether a group of riders, at a distance, ascending an incline before a wondrous ridge, or some really inventive shots from closer to the action, and, for those not familiar with the madcap world of Le Tour and its carnival, it had these people unbelievably posting themselves in the cyclists’ way to get a picture (and no one stopping them doing it) ! What it did not have, despite these strong points, was an idea of where it was going and how the viewer would be taken along :
The film does not know whether it is a film about a man who doped, a man and his colleagues who decided to dope when everyone else was doping, a man who let a film-maker down, a man who betrayed friends and kept up his denial as long as possible, or even about cycling. If Gibney ever asked Armstrong why he risked exploding everything by going back in 2009, he shows no answer in the film, but (even in hindsight) it seems the key question to have put forward.
The only explanation that we have why, in the face of the allegations of the kind made L’Equipe (which even seemed to have changed its tune about Armstrong come 2009) and The Andreus, no one told the truth for so long is in simple, mantra-like repetition of the word omertà , which is not properly translated or put in context by Gibney’s film. On a literal understanding of that word of defiance, federal agents or police officers should not have broken ‘the code of silence’, whereas, in this film, of course they trumped it.
In conclusion, perhaps there, too, Gibney took for granted that his film and what he showed in it made sense and fitted together as a whole. It does not, and, along with the desire of the score to extract anxiety from moments too often and for too long, misjudges its effect just as directly as when a writer tries to proof his own work and is too easily satisfied that what he or she intended to write is what is actually being read, overlooking the typos, the missing or repeated words, or an edit of a sentence that leaves it incoherent.
End-notes
* The writ (or its County Court equivalent, the summons) has not existed for two decades, although the media still like to use the word : they misguidedly think that it sounds more stylish to say Z has issued a writ against B.
** Surely, part of the effect that Scorsese was seeking – after all, there was no way that, although he also makes documentaries, he was going to throw away the doubtful / would-be glamour and glitz that only treatment in a feature could give to the story.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
