Movie Review: The Program (2015)

A biographical sports drama, The Program chronicles the chemically-enhanced rise of a fraud to the pinnacle of world cycling.

In the 1990s, American cyclist Lance Armstrong (Ben Foster) starts to participate in the Tour de France. He notices the top teams are under the care of Dr. Michele Ferrari (Guillaume Canet), who administers chemicals like Erythropoietin (EPO) to enhance performance. A testicular cancer diagnosis interrupts Armstrong's career and he undergoes brutal rounds of chemotherapy treatment.

Upon his return to racing, Armstrong is not considered a contender. But determined to win, he recruits Dr. Ferrari's doping services along with Johan Bruyneel (Denis Menochet) as team director, and they select teammates with the singular purpose of propelling Armstrong to a win. He is promptly victorious in 1999, crushing the field. Sunday Times reporter David Walsh (Chris O'Dowd) is suspicious of Armstrong's dramatically improved performance, but as the American proceeds to dominate the sport, proof of his doping is frustratingly difficult to secure.

Directed by Stephen Frears with a script by John Hodge, The Program adapts Walsh's book Seven Deadly Sins. The reporter is a relatively minor character in the film, with Frears focussing most of his attention on Armstrong as a headstrong phony. In a sport where not cheating means not winning, Armstrong and his crew are portrayed as perfecting doping and test evasion into an art form. His personal story of recovery from cancer provides cover from criticism, while an acquiescent media and inspired fans are happy to celebrate a feel-good story and avoid asking any questions.

The film adopts a relatively straightforward semi-documentary style, with the picturesque racing scenes adding some panache. With Walsh's investigation finding limited traction and a stone-faced liar occupying the story's centre, Frears is caught without a sympathetic protagonist. Ben Foster is in stoic form as a mechanical coldness permeates the narrative, the roboticization aided by an absence of context about Armstrong's formative years.

The Program does succeed in portraying a crass win-at-all-costs mentality devoid of sportsmanship. Armstrong builds a commercial empire on the back of his fake victories, rising to the top echelons of celebrity athletes and brand name recognition. Frears covers Armstrong's charitable work with cancer patients as the one ray of goodness within a jungle of deception.

The recruitment of Mennonite Floyd Landis (Jesse Plemons) into Armstrong's team introduces ethical tension and starts the sequence of events eventually exposing the truth. Also playing a role is professional bridge player and prize money insurance agent Bob Hamman (Dustin Hoffman, in just a couple of scenes), who smells a fraud and starts making inquiries. But the characters remain in the shadows of mendacity, and perhaps appropriately for a sport that sold its soul, The Program replaces the warmth of human achievement with bloodless efficiency.



All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

Movie Review: Juliet, Naked (2018)

A sharp-edged romantic comedy, Juliet, Naked enjoys a playful premise nibbling on life's suspended dreams.

In England, Annie (Rose Byrne) is the museum curator in the small seaside community of Sandcliff. She is getting exasperated with her partner Duncan (Chris O'Dowd), a college professor obsessed with obscure American independent musician Tucker Crowe (Ethan Hawke), who released the album Juliet in 1993 and promptly disappeared mid-tour. Duncan runs a website for other Tucker aficionados, trading rumours about the musician's whereabouts. 

In fact Tucker is living a quiet life in upstate New York. He is trying to remain close to his youngest son Jackson, to make up for having been an inattentive father to all his other children, including London-based Lizzie (Ayoola Smart), herself now pregnant.

The record company sends Duncan an early demo of Tucker's album, this one labelled Juliet, Naked. Annie sarcastically joins the online discussion and is stunned to be contacted by an appreciative Tucker, and they start an exchange of messages. She drifts further apart from Duncan, then has an opportunity to meet Tucker when he travels to London to visit Lizzie.

An adaptation of a Nick Hornby novel, Juliet, Naked provides witty commentary about breaking free from old shackles. Director Jesse Peretz keeps the mood light but mature for the breezy 105 minutes of running time, and the script (co-written by Tamara Jenkins) makes good use of the fictional Sandcliff as a picturesque but still grey English town. Like the characters, the locale appears bogged down in the past, while the soundtrack of angst-riddled 1990's rock (performed by Hawke) underlines a long-gone musical era still dominating the lives of Annie and Duncan.

After 15 years, Annie can no longer deny her relationship with Duncan has a good past but no future. She wants to start a family, while he is still acting like an adolescent with his single-album Tucker infatuation. Meanwhile, Tucker has abandoned music to focus on Jackson, a laudable commitment, except that he is also studiously avoiding mending fences with all his other children (young Jackson hardly knows he even has siblings). Annie, Duncan, and Tucker all need to find the courage to re-engage with today, and some will move forward more gracefully than others.

The secondary characters add colour and humour. Annie's flighty sister Ros (Lily Brazier) believes she is finding love with a different woman every night, while Sandcliff's mayor (Phil Davis) is an eccentric relic more suited for display in Annie's museum.

Compared to her sister and the men in her life, Annie is the only responsible adult in the room, and Rose Byrne is the standout performer, leveraging the anxiety of a biological clock ticking ever louder to kick-start a new chapter. Ethan Hawke can play characters like Tucker Crowe in his sleep, while Chris O'Dowd conveys a man with a teenager's psychology, still stuck in the posters-on-the-wall, hero-worship stage.

Astute and amusing, Juliet, Naked enjoys good acoustics.



All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.