In 1999, after surviving a bout of testicular cancer, Lance Armstrong won his first of seven Tour de France titles. But his meteoric rise to sports superstardom was undone with a spectacular and permanent fall from grace, when in 2013 after overwhelming evidence of his guilt surfaced, Armstrong admitted to doping throughout his career and was stripped of all his major titles and banned from cycling for life.
2015's The Program recreates the behind-the-scenes story of how Armstrong (Ben Foster) was finally brought down. Based on the book Seven Deadly Sins, journalist David Walsh's account of the key role he played in exposing Armstrong's and his cycling team's doping program, director Stephen Frears and writer John Hodge offer a mostly riveting and judicious treatment of a scandal we all heard so much about; only in a few scenes in the middle section does the approach seem stagnant. The race scenes are beautifully filmed and Frears bravely makes us see intravenous doping at its bloodiest. This isn't done for gratuity either; only to forcefully emphasise just how driven and ruthless Armstrong and his colleagues were in their pursuit of glory at all costs.
Foster is solid as this very corrupt but complex and mortal individual, equally convincing as Lance at his most competitive and egomaniacal and as Lance during moments of paranoia. Jesse Plemons is well-balanced as Armstrong's whistle-blowing competitor Floyd Landis, too, but I think the best and most surprising performance comes from Chris O'Dowd, who here proves he's way more than just a comedian, superbly and sincerely filling Walsh's shoes and entirely channeling the suspicion and determination with which the real Walsh helped to see justice served.
The Program is a slightly flawed, but excellent account of perhaps the defining sports scandal of this century so far.
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