It’s hard to remain objective when a film’s protagonist is ego-driven, sanctimonious and smug and the director isn’t far behind him! In Alex Gibney’s (We Steal Secrets / Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence In The House Of God, Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room) new documentary The Armstrong Lie, on the rise and fall of cycling’s ex-golden boy Lance Armstrong, the most revealing scene is the clash of egos between the director and his subject, for when Armstrong apologises to Gibney for ‘ruining your doco…’, the response is ‘no-one can ruin my documentaries’. Ha! That was worth the rather tedious 123 minutes that you have to sit through to reach a conclusion with no real revelations and reviews a lot of material that has already been covered at length in other media.

Armstrong was a cancer survivor who had gone on to become the winner of seven Tour de France titles before he retired from competitive racing in 2005. This extraordinary feat had caused his fame to cross-over into the non-cycling world and he and his Livestrong Foundation were global household names. So in 2008, when Armstrong announced his return to professional cycling, Gibney set out to cover Armstrong’s unprecedented comeback; in fact, the original doco was going to be titled The Road Back. Four years later, after Armstrong had confessed to Oprah Winfrey in a televised interview that he was a dope cheat, Gibney had to re-think his film and turn it into an exposé. However, while watching this follow-up to the Oprah revelations, one is still left wondering whether ol’ Lance has it in him to feel any remorse at all.

The doco spends a lot of time dragging up old foes, like his ex-team-mate Frankie Andreu and his embittered wife, Betsy, whose gripe was not so much that Armstrong had cheated, for they were all doing it, but that he continued to profess his innocence long after the rest of them had confessed. If you are a fan of the greatest cycling event in the world, the Tour de France, the film shows how much of it is, or was, a sham - perhaps it should be remodelled as a medical experiment in drug augmentation? At least it would bring in a constant flow of Big Pharma sponsorship!

Story aside, The Armstrong Lie features some brilliant camerawork by Gibney’s team of cinematographers. The scenes where the cyclists are hurtling along through crowds of over-enthusiastic people running along side them to take ‘selfies’ are more than a tad disconcerting and really put you in the thick of the action. The editing team, too, deserve credit for the immediacy of the cycling footage. This is where the film’s excitement lies.

Gibney could succeed in bringing the story to an audience who may have missed out on the original exposé but, in saying that, one is left to wonder who that audience would be. World headlines were made in 2012 when Armstrong was stripped of all seven of his previous titles and banned him from all sport for life. The terrible message at the heart of the film could best be summed up by Armstrong’s own words, “I didn’t live a lot of lies, but I lived one big one.” One would hope that he would be shocked to learn that, in saying this, he was echoing the thoughts of Adolf Hitler, who wrote “…in the primitive simplicity of [people’s] minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie”. * On the evidence presented here, I suspect not.

// SALT

Previewed at Sony Pictures Theatrette, Sydney, on 26 February 2014


* Adolf Hitler , Mein Kampf, vol. I, ch. X. Project Gutenberg of Australia - Mein Kampf tr. James Murphy.