'Wired' is winning tour of race, brain
Fans of Lance Armstrong may be disappointed by ''Wired to Win: Surviving the Tour de France," the
Instead, the 45-minute film features two demigods, Australian cyclist Baden Cooke and France's Jimmy Casper, both riders for the FDJeux team. They perform miracles enough -- or rather, their neurons, synapses, and hypothalamuses perform the miracles. The true star of ''Wired" is the human brain, and it's ready for its close-up. But what do you expect from a movie produced by Partners HealthCare?
Filmed during the 2003 Tour de France, the race's centennial, ''Wired" holds appeal for two distinct audiences: kids (and their parents) seeking to understand how the human body adapts to high-stakes physical endeavor and biking fanatics who want to experience the famous three-week event on a screen big enough to wrap around their heads. The movie scores on both counts.
As Casper and Cooke prepare for the Tour, ''Wired" sketches in the basics of the race -- the cyclist with the best time overall wins the yellow jersey while other contestants aim for winning an individual stage or claiming one of the ''lesser" jerseys -- then burrows through the ear of a racer to enter the human brain. This is the command center, different parts of which respond to pain, unexpected developments, and the need for endurance and focus. That last comes in handy when you're grinding up the Alpe d'Huez with hundreds of rowdy fans screaming in your face.
There's a neat, spooky bit of computer animation in which we see a racer's body slowly build up as he cycles: first the brain hovering above the bike, then the nervous system, skeleton, muscles. Elsewhere, the film dives into fields of rapid-firing neurons, ''Fantastic Voyage" style, and shows how the brain constantly rewires itself to deal with new challenges. Take comfort, fogies -- according to ''Wired," the brain never stops learning.
Both aspects of the film come together when Casper goes down in a sickening mass crash early in the race. The French cyclist gamely continues riding for several days in a neck brace before calling it quits, and his misfortune is the filmmakers' stroke of luck as we see how Casper's brain adapts to his injuries.
Armstrong's notorious spill on the Col du Tourmalet during the 15th stage is captured in non-IMAX news footage and his astonishing burst to win the day is used to illustrate what separates skilled athletes from the champions. ''Motivation is the fuel of the brain," intones narrator Alfred Molina, and the point is underscored by Cooke's dramatic last-minute surge to take the green jersey for best sprinter of the Tour.
''Wired to Win" gets so deeply into the specifics of cycling and ganglia that it lacks only a certain poetry to be a perfect IMAX movie. There's an unstated visual harmony between a tiny line of racers along a vast range of Alps and electrical impulses coursing along an unseen inner network, but the film doesn't do much with it. It shows the macro and the micro and leaves the fusing of the two up to us.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.
