The Armstrong Lie (2013)

Pretty Good

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

When everyone cheats, it becomes a different contest. The powerful friends, money (125 million plus), risk and pain tolerance, influential scientists, compelling story, performance enhancing drugs, viciousness, ambition to win at all costs, willingness to bully others, . . . Armstrong has all this and more. The documentary is a powerful and gripping indictment not just of Armstrong and cycling, but of sports and humanity in general. Armstrong's doping is bad, but his abuse of power is worse. The film shows how willing people are to be fooled, or to trample on others. Despite its two-hour length, the film held my interest throughout. There are so many parallels in a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, wherein he writes, "There is something truer and more real, than what we can see with the eyes, and touch with the finger." So too with Armstrong, cycling, sports, and all of us. This brilliant documentary helps bring such truths to the surface.

First and foremost, I don't condone anything Lance Armstrong did. That being said, from a summarized look, we all live lives that are constructed for us. Some are mothers, others are painters, others are this or that. So with someone in high stakes sports at the most difficult and professional level, it's tough to judge anyone unless one's walked a day in their shoes/in their life.It can be understood that Armstrong had everything at stake, everything to lose on this lie, therefore it can be understood why he kept it going. And if any one of us were put in that situation where the stakes were just as high, who knows what we would do. It's easy to judge, but it's not easy to live a life where the stakes are so extreme.With that said, I never caught on to the whole Armstrong Phenomena, but if I was to learn one of my heroes such as Joel O'Steen was a liar, I would be crushed. So I dislike what Armstrong did extremely not for the lie itself or for what he felt he had to do, but for how the lie connected with so many people and how it hurt so many people. For that and that alone I dislike Armstrong very much.Because even though he did have cancer, he used it in connection with his one big lie to inspire hope, love, money, friendships, and infinite possibilities that anything can be beaten or achieved. His foundations raised so much money for a good cause, that it helped many children and adults fight their battles.The money his organization raised did so much good. We should be thankful that the organization saved a lot of lives with the money it raised. But the Armstrong lie shattered a lot of lives with people losing their inspiration and hope, and hating Armstrong. It also wasn't right how Armstrong defamed a lot of people to keep the lie going.It's really about the children though, where Armstrong is in the scenes with the kids with cancer, and with their parents. I can just imagine if those kids were still alive and how those parents must have felt that this man, Lance Armstrong, had the audacity to lead these parents and children on with this lie. Because the hope wasn't so much the cancer, it was that he was beating the odds with it with his cycling. And the cycling was the lie, and everything else was connected to that lie and went down the drain with that lie.Lance Armstrong understood what was at stake and he understood what would happen if he was caught and I respect at least the fact that he was completely honest with his truth about it finally, showing no remorse because showing any emotion would have been in vain anyway. However, it shows what a cold and in some way heartless human being Armstrong is in not breaking down and feeling bad for what he did. It's human to feel bad for living a lie. It's human to feel stress that what you're doing if you are caught hurt yourself and a lot people.But it seems Armstrong showed no remorse at all. He was living the incarnate of a slippery slope, of walking the line, the tightrope, in the end everything went down with his lie because it was all connected to it, from the cancer, to the hope he inspired, to the money, to the everything, that one lie became the lie to everything.At least Armstrong understood the fact that it's fair that he's getting what he deserves now. Maybe he's not ultimately an awful person, but he got caught in a lie that made him an awful person. I almost wish he would have never gotten caught for the good that his Cancer Organization did. Such a shame all around. Truly is. Shame on Lance for how he hurt and destroyed so many people.

Cheating to achieve victory in a sport becomes if not completely irrelevant, at least secondary. If the path we choose to achieve that goal is vicious and tends to hurt other people, that is what becomes real.As we can understand from this documentary and Armstrong's words and actions, if a lie is told enough times, during enough time, with the strong conviction that it will persuade the others, it will eventually persuade ourselves. It will become true. We will be in denial.This is an enjoyable film both visually (because it has cycling footage) and intellectually (because it kept me wondering about the necessity of its existence).

. . . since the Oscar-winning director of TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE obviously cowers before Lance Armstrong and the Texas Mafia "Code of Omuerta" far more than he feared the U.S. military when he was making his earlier flick. Here's some of the questions Gibney is afraid to ask in THE ARMSTRONG LIE. Though he shows a fawning Barbara Walters saying "You go, boy" while encouraging Lance to destroy the lives of any truth tellers on her show THE VIEW, Gibney doesn't ask why this thoughtless TV maven isn't totally silenced immediately. Though he shows how Armstrong had employees threaten truth tellers in phone answering machine messages with murder-by-baseball-bat (while wishing that those on the side of justice also suffer cancer first), Gibney doesn't ask Armstrong if he signed a formal contract with Satan, or just has an "understanding" with Big Red. (Okay, that might be unfair, because maybe none of Armstrong's Fundamentalist backers actually BELIEVE a word of their professed theology.) Though Gibney clearly shows Armstrong admitted to testosterone, EPO, human growth hormone, and blood transfusion doping in the mid-1990s BEFORE Lance got cancer (or won any important bike races), he never asks Armstrong what the chances are that ingesting this devil's brew CAUSED his cancer in the first place! Many people who do not formally believe in Satan have faith in karma ("what goes around comes around"), but Gibney swallows the canard that Armstrong's Live Wrong Foundation IS doing ACTUAL GOOD on BLIND FAITH, never asking to see the gold standard of science: a "double-blind study" showing that a matched set of cancer patients, including half with Live Wrong contact, actually resulted in BETTER outcomes for the Live Wrong people (common sense and karma may suggest otherwise). Further, Gibney doesn't bother to ask whether Ben Franklin's 200-year-old U.S. Postal Service has been fatally wounded by the fortune lost when its Sponsoree, Armstrong, "went Postal." Finally, Gibney views Armstrong here in a vacuum, never asking him about Texas culture and how he likes his place on America's newest monument, Mount Liemore, right between LBJ (of Kennedy Assassination Cover-up fame) and the Bushes (the Elder's CIA "October Surprise" with the Iran Hostages brought Reagan to power, and the Younger is still fingered by most Americans polled for orchestrating a 9-11 cover-up). Is it a "coincidence" that all four of these Hall of Shamers are Texans? Sorry, Alex, as Jack Nicholson once said, "You just can't handle the truth!" Fortunately, as William Shakespeare wrote earlier, "The Truth will out."