Icarus (2017)

Bryan Fogel sets out to make a small, self-serving film about his own bloodstream. A high-level amateur cyclist with a camera and a hypothesis, he wants to demonstrate that anti-doping testing is a sieve, and he enlists Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, the director of the Moscow Anti-Doping Laboratory, to help him slip through it. What follows is a stretch of Skype calls, hormone injections, and urine samples shipped across oceans, a sequence that plays like a buddy comedy staged in a urology clinic. Then the comedy curdles. Rodchenkov's name surfaces in an international investigation, and the film's subject quietly changes hands.

From there Icarus becomes a procedural about state-sponsored fraud: the Sochi sample-swapping scheme, the security officers moving through the laboratory walls, the whistleblower smuggled to Los Angeles and placed in witness protection. The anger here is aimed at institutions, at WADA and the IOC and a government that treats medals as propaganda. It is not an anger organized around class, capital, or any of the contemporary vocabularies that have lately attached themselves to the documentary form. The cast is the real cast, the scientists and lawyers and cyclists who lived it, arranged for nothing in particular beyond the facts.

The ending is where the film tips its hand. Title cards announce that Russia still denies everything and that Rodchenkov remains in hiding, and Fogel, accepting an Academy Award, calls the film a wake-up call about telling the truth. That is a moral register, earnest and humanist, the sort of thing documentaries have been doing for decades. It lectures, mildly, about honesty and institutional failure. It does not lecture about anything else. We classify it accordingly, with a clean conscience and a mild fatigue, as a film about corruption that has the good manners to stay on topic.

{"thematic_tags": ["oscar_winner", "true_story"]}