<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"FacebookPinterest\n\nEspecially when we're hustling to a screening, it's easy to spot my co-citizens in Toronto at festival time. Unlike the locals, we jaywalk, ignoring the rumors that the penalty for doing so in Canada is less lenient than what we'd face for a murder rap. So it seemed oddly fitting that I acted out this truth Monday morning on my way to see back-to-back docs about two celebrated American scofflaws.\n\nThe first of them could have been a lot better. Starting with its inept title, Alex Gibney's The Armstrong Lie is a far cry from the incisive Lance Armstrong takedown that Mr. \"A Bicycle Built For Tools\" deserves. The movie's muddled structure reflects its grab-bag of intentions; we learn from the director himself that he started out helming a upbeat doc about Armstrong's comeback bid in the 2009 Tour de France. Then the roof fell in and Oprah piled on, and once electroshock cured Gibney's severe depression\u2014nah, just kidding\u2014he opted to go the sadder-but-wiser route instead. But he couldn't bring himself to dump all the bee-you-ti-ful but clueless footage he shot back in '09, so it's repurposed with maundering voiceovers wondering whether Gibney's now tarnished hero was doping or not at the time.\n\nAside from a familiar but not-bad recap of Armstrong's earlier career, The Armstrong Lie's upside is that the filmmaker wangled a lengthy post-downfall interview out of his subject to make up for blowing Gibney's payday. And as always, Armstrong is fascinating to watch and listen to\u2014not because he's changed, but because he so obviously hasn't. There isn't much doubt he still thinks authenticity is for suckers; those rifleman eyes of his never stop measuring the effect of his new role every bit as unsentimentally as they did his old one. When you're a shrewd dude like our Lance, survival everywhere from celebrity's pinnacle to ignominy is all about figuring the angles better than anyone else. The bullet Texas if not America dodged when he went back to cycling instead of trying politics doesn't even bear thinking about.\n\nCall it symptomatic of our culture's peculiar rules that Armstrong, who only damaged an already notoriously corrupt sport that practically nobody Stateside gave two hoots about until he came along, still has to at least feign contrition. But Donald Rumsfeld, who as Bush 43's defense secretary helped oversee our most disastrous military intervention since Vietnam, doesn't. Beaming like a Cheshire clock\u2014not cat\u2014he's on camera for most of Errol Morris's The Unknown Known, and his similarity to Armstrong is that his deep pleasure in being Donald Rumsfeld hasn't altered either. At times, his obliviousness to the very concept of second thoughts makes him resemble the world's most talkative deaf-mute.\n\nMorris's movie\u2014whose title comes from Rumsfeld's famous Iraq-war dictum about known knowns, known unknowns, and so forth\u2014is as acute as Gibney's is uncharacteristically waffling Just as he was during the brisk, caustic Pentagon press conferences that turned him into a neocon dreamboat for a while, the former SecDef is more entertaining than a war criminal has any right to be as he fends off every suggestion of error with the same quizzical contempt for any values other than utilitarian and/or situational ones. Most likely, he'll never understand that his pride in cutting through everyone else's illusions about how the world works is his own customized form of self-deception.\n\nIf Rumseld and his ilk apparently believe that we poor sheep can't be governed without secrets and lies, the movie version of Tracy Letts's August: Osage County, which I toddled off to Monday afternoon, left me ruefully pondering how up the creek most American playwrights would be if a skeleton in every closet wasn't their equivalent of a chicken in every pot. Since this giant hunk of hambone-friendly claptrap won a Pulitzer Prize in its Broadway incarnation, Letts's regurgitation of every nuclear-family Hiroshima this side of the kitchen sink\u2014what, did Lillian Hellman's estate refuse to make hers available?\u2014no doubt worked effectively on stage. Directed by John Wells, the screen adaptation is such a clunker that I bet even audiences usually cowed by secondhand prestige won't take to it.\n\nIt sure is filled with marquee-name performers under the misapprehension that they're doing great work, though. So pleased with every fluttery pause between banshee screech and vulnerable croak that she could be giving an after-dinner speech at Meryl Streep College, Meryl Streep plays the pill-addicted materfamilias of the dysfunctional Weston clan, contentiously reunited in their Oklahoma manse by\u2014Christ, how is it nobody ever thought of this before?\u2014Dad's drunken, despairing shuffle off this mortal coil. The Weston daughters are played by Julia Roberts, Juliette Lewis and Julianne Nicholson, which must leave Julie Kavner feeling awfully left out. Ewan MacGregor, Chris Cooper, Benedict Cumberbatch, Sam Shepard and Dermot Mulroney have the thankless job of incarnating the women's worse halves, about as dismal a bunch of cuckolds, boozy flops, wan adulterers and calf-eyed imbeciles as you could hope to see anywhere outside a Princetonians Anonymous meeting.\n\nThen those pesky family secrets start bubbling up and nobody escapes unscathed. Letts's daisy chain of revelations is so shamelessly relentless that Tennessee Williams and Eugene O'Neill must be shaking hands in the afterlife as they marvel at their restraint. The movie could have been entertaining anyway if it had been played for deliberate hyperbole, but Wells hardly has the style or smarts for that. He's got so little knack for pacing or basic camera placement that even the play's much-lauded showcase scene\u2014a family dinner where all hell breaks loose\u2014is an endless mess, full of flat-footed shots that don't cut together worth a damn. To be honest, I'd have loved to jaywalk my way out then and there, but I stayed to the end so you won't have to."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/gq-at-the-toronto-film-festival-watch-lance-armstrong-and-donald-rumsfeld-dig-themselves-even-deeper>