• Post category:Movies
  • Post last modified:June 13, 2021

The Armstrong Lie

armstronglieOnce upon a time there was a noted documentary director who decided to make a movie called The Road Back about the comeback of the world’s most famous and successful cyclist, Lance Armstrong. That was in 2009, and then the shit hit the fan. The final results are a very different movie, one that explores Armstrong’s life and career with the intention of finding out how he could betray a whole world and keep up his lies about doping. Alex Gibney is clearly fascinated by that part, having been exposed to them in person, and draws a connection between Armstrong’s confidence in lying and a culture of doping and deceit that seems inherent in the sport itself. A long but engrossing film, with a star who’s eerily charismatic.

2013-U.S. 124 min. Color. Produced by Alex Gibney, Frank Marshall, Matthew Tolmach. Written and directed by Alex Gibney.

Trivia: The Armstrong scandal was also dramatized in The Program (2015).

Last word:I was angry, but for a slightly different reason than Frank Marshall might have been angry. Frank, I think, was a true believer. Frank believed that he hadn’t doped. I can’t say that I didn’t think that he [hadn’t] — the logic of it seemed improbable. Like, all those guys on the podium, and Lance is the only guy who didn’t dope? […] But I was angry that I felt that I’d been part of a PR campaign. That made me angry…and the fact that he’d looked me in the eye and lied to me any number of times. […] The mission afterwards was to say, ‘You owe it to me to make it right. And I’m going to do everything I can do to tell the full story, about the anatomy of the lie.’ It wasn’t so much like, ‘I’m going to get him now,’ because he’d already been got. It was more to get a fuller understanding of what happened, and what my role in it had been.” (Gibney, Vulture)

 

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