6) The Armstrong Lie
The Lance Armstrong story is one that is known to nearly everyone by now, and one that seems destined to be repeated in almost every sport at some point. We can probably expect The A-Rod Lie to be made a few years down the road. So it’s understandable, to a degree, why people would complain about a documentary about Armstrong both before and after seeing it. The details of his story have been laid out in various media, books, TV and print stories, and so a feature film chronicling his rise and fall would seem superfluous were it left in the hands of someone less capable than Alex Gibney.
The Armstrong Lie rests on many of the plot points within the Lance Armstrong saga, but it’s also diving into a much deeper and more nefarious problem, having to do with systematic corruption in a sport looking to rehabilitate its image.
Even with documentaries, which thrive on factual revelation, perspective matters, and offering an interesting perspective on previously known information is justification enough for a movie to be made, as far as I’m concerned. The Armstrong Lie is a terrific exploration of Gibney’s filmmaking process as an analogy for the seduction of the Lance Armstrong narrative. His personal bias as a documentarian gets called into question as he ponders the story he’s actually telling, how it compares to the story he set out to tell, and the story as might exist from an objective observer. This tension, and the doc’s exposure of this, makes the facts that we already knew about Armstrong a mere backstory to the crux of The Armstrong Lie. What was deemed unnecessary is actually integral to a really great piece of filmmaking.
