In chronicling the rise and precipitous fall of notorious
figure skater Tonya Harding (played by Margot Robbie), director Craig
Gillespie’s “I, Tonya” tells a quintessentially American story of class, cycles
of abuse, and sensationalist tabloid culture, wrapped up in a barbed, darkly
funny, and wildly entertaining package.
“I, Tonya”
traces Harding’s hardscrabble life from childhood through adulthood, and her
involvement in what the participants refer to as “the incident” — a plot
hatched by her ex-husband Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian
Stan) and his dimwitted associate Shawn Eckardt (a
hilarious Paul Walter Hauser) to take down Harding’s chief rival, Nancy Kerrigan.
That event captured the world’s attention, turning Harding into a pariah and
national punchline.
The film’s
narrative is based on hours of interviews screenwriter Steven Rogers conducted
with Harding, Gillooly, her mother LaVona (Allison Janney), and a number of key peripheral
figures in her life. The actors reenact those interviews throughout the film,
speaking directly to the camera and offering their own wildly contradictory
accounts, commenting and often disputing the events as we see them unfold.
Growing up
in a working class family, Tonya never projected the picture-perfect image of
grace and femininity the figure skating community expected from its stars. In
her home life, she suffered through a constant stream of abuse, first at the
hands of LaVona, then Gillooly,
and ultimately the film argues, the American public.
Adding some
much-needed context to the portions of the story that would be ingrained in the
national consciousness, “I, Tonya” never sets out to exonerate its protagonist.
But it does find sympathy for her, introducing its audience to the wounded,
flawed human being behind the scandal.
“There’s no
such thing as ‘truth’,” Harding says at one point in the story. It’s unlikely
we’ll ever know exactly for sure how much she knew about the plan to sabotage
Kerrigan, but in the context of the story Rogers and Gillespie are telling,
that hardly matters. It’s a smart decision, and one that spares the audience
from having to scrutinize everything we see and wonder whether or not this is
how things really happened.
The film
also reminds us that at the height of her career, Harding truly was one of the
country’s greatest athletes. One of the film’s most heartbreaking scenes comes
when she gets the chance to talk about the moment she became the first American
woman to land the incredibly difficult triple axel in competition, getting
wistful as she admits: “No one ever asks me about that anymore.”
Given the
opportunity to stretch more as an actress than she’s ever been allowed before,
Margot Robbie’s performance is revelatory. At first the tall, model-beautiful
actress seems a poor fit to play Harding, a 5’1,” self-proclaimed redneck. But
Robbie nails her physicality and gets at the wounded anger and defiance that
made Harding such a fierce competitor. It’s her pure, desperate determination
that ensured she would survive anything that life dished out. And playing a
larger-than-life character, Janney finds the sorrow beneath LaVona’s
tough-as-nails, chain-smoking exterior, and keeps her from turning into a mere
caricature.
“I, Tonya”
is often hilarious, but it never shies away from the fact that at its heart,
the story it’s telling is a tragedy. That uneasy balance between tragedy and
farce have led some to accuse its treatment of domestic violence as being too
flippant. But the filmmakers are never dismissive of the abuse it depicts,
which is never less than horrific to witness. That tone is a tricky line to
walk, and though Gillespie wobbles every now and then, for the most part he
pulls it off (aside from a frustrating tendency to lean on overly obvious
soundtrack selections to underscore crucial moments).
Watching the
film isn’t intended to be an entirely comfortable experience, and it strikes a
tone reminiscent of “To Die For” or “The Wolf of Wall Street” — two other
stories centered around charismatic anti-heroes. In
its more confrontational moments, I was reminded of Rodney Dangerfield’s scenes
in “Natural Born Killers,” which staged scenes of abuse as a garish sitcom, its
laugh track only emphasizing the sheer ugliness on display. It’s a technique
Gillespie and Rogers clearly took to heart, understanding that it’s often the
bitter pills whose taste lingers the longest.
This article appears in Jan 17-23, 2018.
