The Armstrong Lie
The rise and fall of the world’s greatest cyclist, and the massive doping scandal that took him down would make for a compelling Shakespearean drama just about any way you play it, but documentarian Alex Gibney has a slightly different, more personal agenda in The Armstrong Lie.
The prolific Gibney, director of hard-hitting exposés like Taxi to the Dark Side and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, as well as sports docs like Catching Hell and The Last Gladiators, was hired by Armstrong and his people to document the cyclist’s return to the Tour de France in 2009. Though he had been accused of doping by a number of associates, at the time the superstar athlete still insisted that he was clean; the planned documentary was to be, essentially, a fluff job. But along the way, Armstrong’s elaborate web of lies came undone, and the cascading scandal became the center of attention: One of Gibney’s sports docs had turned into yet another of his revelations of power and privilege.
As a result, the director takes a more subjective approach here. He narrates the film, detailing Armstrong’s deception of him, and intercutting the footage he shot for the earlier film with the news story unraveling before him. It’s a wise decision: We don’t really need to see the Cliffs Notes version of Armstrong’s life, nor do we need a belated cataloging of the cyclist’s deceit. The Armstrong Lie is probably too messy, too full of loose ends, too personal to work as a straightforward document of l’affaire Lance. But Gibney reveals, by showing us how Armstrong and his people hoped to (and, for a while, did) play him, something ineffable and troubling about the complex relationship between artist and subject. And to his credit, he does it soberly. The Armstrong Lie is fair but full of hurt.
