THE PROGRAM

(Stephen Frears, 2015)

The first act here strikes an odd balance. It portrays Lance Armstrong (Ben Foster)

as a sympathetic protagonist, forced into doping because if he wanted to win, well then that was the only way. Everybody else was doing it, so why shouldn’t he? Especially when he has had to fight off cancer, a time in his life depicted as an awful battle  in grim, shadowed hospital rooms.

Lance’s return sees him convinced that doping is the only way, and he embraces the work of his Doctor Michele Ferarri (Guillaume Canet) and is rewarded with seven consecutive tour de France victories.

He is friend to Presidents and celebrities, adored for his charity which raises millions for cancer research, happily married with children, and one of the greatest athletes on Earth.

Only David Walsh (Chris O’Dowd) is disgusted. If everybody can see there is something wrong within cycling, then everybody is happy to stay silent. But Walsh cannot. He rants and asks questions, and it is then, when he is backed into a corner, that we see another side of Lance. He bullies, threatens, sues. He uses cancer and his charity as a shield. He gets away with it. Until he doesn’t anymore.

The procedural aspects of this story are its most interesting element.

How Armstrong and his team doped, how he escaped detection for so long. But director Frears and screenwriter John Hodge want this to be something of a character study, and that is where the film comes somewhat unstuck.

Armstrong loves winning, loves a battle. But that doesn’t explain him, explain his controlling aggression, explain the way he destroys those who oppose him. Ben Foster does his best, but when his Armstrong looks into a mirror he seems like an empty puppet. These filmmakers don’t understand this man. And that leaves the film curiously hollow.

CALVARY

(John Michael McDonagh, 2014)

Brendan Gleeson is a great actor. And with John Michael McDonagh he seems to have found a writer-director who understands how best to use him, who sees the depths in him and is able to access them in his work.
Their first film together, The Guard, found the wicked humour in Gleeson, and let him deadpan his way through some hilarious dialogue, while never losing sight of the intelligence in his eyes. Here, McDonagh allows him to brood and think, and his expressive face and clear body language lets the audience in on what he is thinking.
And that in turn allows McDonagh to consider his big themes - faith and atheism, the Church and god, the meaning of religion itself - through his leading man. Gleeson plays a "good priest" in a small Sligo parish. Informed in a confessional in the opening scene by an unseen Parishioner that he will be murdered "Sunday week" as vengeance for the abuse the man suffered at the hands of a Priest as a child, he spends the week seemingly as he normally would. This provides an episodic structure but also allows McDonagh to portray not just the Priest but also his community as he visits troubled parishioners and they visit him.
They include a cynically aetheistic Surgeon (Aidan Gillen), an imprisoned serial killer (Domhnall Gleeson), a former banker who made millions from Celtic Tiger Ireland (Dylan Moran), a cuckolded butcher (Chris O'Dowd) and a few more. Gleeson dispenses advice, tries not to judge, gives the last rites, and argues theology with many. The Catholic Church is fair game in modern Ireland, seen as child abusing, greedy and fascistic, and Calvary reflects this nicely, in the many bitter barbs aimed Gleeson's way by his neighbours.
The most emotional storyline involves the arrival of his daughter (Kelly Reilly) wearing bandages on her wrists from a recent failed suicide attempt, and his attempts to deal with this while his own mortality hangs over him. McDonagh writes terrific dialogue, and that combined with an excellent cast allows the often simplistic archetypes which constitute his characters to burst to life here. They challenge, amuse and touch Gleeson and his own brilliance means that his struggle with their eccentricities and biases is always clear and involving.
McDonagh is a classicist in style, and his film is filled with simple, powerful compositions, artfully contrasting the huge skies and bleak beauty of Sligo with some startling stylised interiors. Mainly though his camera focuses on Gleeson. The big man can carry any film if allowed to, and given this script he works more than a few wonders.

THIS IS 40

(Judd Apatow, 2012)

Judd Apatow needs to hire an editor who has the guts to tell him "No." This is 40 suffers terribly from his power and status and his own ability to indulge himself. His films have always been a little bloated and overlong in comparison with most comedies, but at least The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up had appreciable structures and some drive. This is 40 is an almighty mess of floating, interlinked doodles on the same subjects for the first hour and a half, before pulling a smidgen of narrative momentum together in the last act. In a young director who hadn't been responsible for billions of dollars of box office grosses as director and producer, that wouldn't be tolerated. But Apatow most likely has final cut on his movie, and if he wants to include numerous overlong scenes featuring his children improvising or linger a touch too long on his wife's (admittedly very fine) lead performance, then who is going to tell him to stop? Nobody is, evidently...
It doesn't help that the film is so nakedly autobiographical. Taking the characters of Pete (Paul Rudd) and Debbie (Leslie Mann) from Knocked Up, This is 40 chronicles their dual mid-life crisis as they both reach their 40th birthdays in the same week. They live in what - in most lives - would qualify as a mansion in an obviously affluent Los Angeles suburb, the house beautifully furnished and decorated and filled with electronic devices (every family member seems to have their own iPad), they drive beautiful cars and own their own businesses - he a retro Record Label and she a boutique. They have two daughters, one just entering adolescence, the other missing her suddenly too-old-to-be-friends big sister, and each has issues from relationships with their fathers. From here, Apatow introduces a large cast of friends, relatives and employees, and finds a few great scenes and moments from the result. But too often he instead spends overlong sequences embellishing slight observations on the quirks of early middle age. Much of this material has the sting of truth to it, as do the many gags and takes on long-term relationships, but too much of it is vaguely fuzzy and dull; a sort of lifestyle movie-making with a sheen of low-key edginess which is not enough to make it worthwhile.
Perhaps other elements are enough: Rudd and Mann are both superb, funny, sympathetic and believable people with layers and personalities even as their lives and angst are vaguely contemptible in all their ease and luxury. The supporting cast is a little ostentatious in its flagrant waste of performers, but the likes of Albert Brooks, Melissa McCarthy and Megan Fox all register well.
Apatow's films are always admirable for being about the world we live in now, even as they are so narrowly focused on a particular social group and setting, and This is 40 is no different. But a little less would have been good; if this had been 90 minutes it might have been a bracing, sharp, witty 90 minutes. As it is we have a baggy, middling but occasionally inspired and waaaaay overlong movie which feels like a DVD directors cut (one can only imagine how long that will be)..