'Lance': Film Review – Marina Zenovich's Lance Armstrong doc justifies its three-hour-plus running time, says DPD_
Late in the film “Lance,” a documentary that depicts the ascent and the crash of disgraced cyclist, the subject recalls the disappearance of his lucrative sponsorships. These deals — with a massive market value and a perhaps more important intangible value of keeping him in the public eye as a figure of rectitude and hard work — were in some sense his life’s work, and they vanished after his 2013 admission that he had used illegal doping throughout his cycling career.
The Armstrong of the present day, a fellow who speaks at length to Zenovich’s camera and at times evades her prompts, is squirrelly and somewhat lost. He has only just settled a lawsuit with the U.S. government , and his need for money forms a steady, subtle backbeat to the story. What he more pointedly needs is a place to be: He hangs around the house a lot with his girlfriend and kids.
Counterpoint is never used cruelly or gratuitously here, but connections announce themselves all the same. As a former cancer patient who ended up winning seven Tour de France titles, Armstrong was seen as a national avatar of resilience, grit, and optimism. He emerged as a superstar after both his own having survived cancer and after previous doping scandals left the sport of cycling in need of a transformational hero.
Which Armstrong cannot allow himself to recognize, in what comes to be a masterful depiction of a person for whom lying is more natural than truth. The film bears similarities to the similar character study “O.J.: Made in America” , but tends to keep its aperture focused more tightly on Armstrong’s own behavior rather than what it tells us about his world.
It’s in moments like those, or like his flashing, bitter anger at the whistleblower who brought his world down — far more rancorous, still, than it might be had Armstrong accepted his fate as much as he’d like us to think — that the human emerges. This is, perhaps, the most valuable excavation Zenovich does. Armstrong was uniquely effective as a spokesperson for a personal brand with a lot of associations , but no real meaning; his period of megafame required little humanity.
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