A warning: Not all tales of redemption have a happy ending. The comeback kid doesn’t always get the comeback. Lost years cannot be dragged back.
Case in point: David Millar. He was Lance Armstrong before Lance Armstrong, one of the highest-profile touring cyclists to be banned from the sport. Yet director Finlay Pretsell deliberately avoids any details of what and how and why. It’s enough to know that, in 2014, Millar tried to get back on the road to the Tour de France – his nemesis, his greatest victory, his defining achievement.
If there’s ever a biopic of Millar, the inevitable casting choice will be Benedict Cumberbatch: the same razor-precision and self-assurance, the angularity, and the absolute agony of knowing self-destruction. “I fucked up,” Millar says at a press conference, and Pretsell’s camera catches that absolute, resolute belief that he failed everyone, and that this is his last chance to prove that cheaters never win, but ex-cheaters can have a shot.
But this is not TMZ, all prurient details scraped from legal files. At the world premiere on March 10, Millar said instead that an artist friend had said he could not have been more exposed if he had stood naked on a table for the audience. Pretsell catches what it is to be in a time trial – not just the baroque intricacies of team racing, but the sheer misery of biking uphill in the rain for a couple of hundred miles, just to earn the right to bike a few hundred more miles. If you don’t like training, as one competitor puts it, this isn’t the sport for you.
Pretsell eschews the prurient details with emotional truths, and a lyrical, hypnotic insight into what it takes, and what the experience is to be on a touring bike for mile after mile, and race after race, and year after year, and muscle tear after muscle tear. He is fearless in his shot selection, like using GoPro footage when half the lens is covered in water, refracting the road like sweat in the eye.
The darkest pull is the sinking feeling that Millar’s quest is doomed and damned, and that he knows it, and his team knows it, but the draw of the road keeps them going until the air is out of all their tires. It’s hard to watch, but impossible not to be drawn into his raging against the dying of his own personal light.
Time Trial
Documentary Spotlight, North American Premiere
Thursday, March 15, 1:45pm, Zach Theatre
This article appears in March 9 • 2018.
