Movie Reaction: I, Tonya

Formula: Ice Princess * Foxcatcher

If anyone is in need of a character rehabilitation, it's Tonya Harding. If you think of all the notorious women from the 90's, what she actually did was pretty tame. I mean Amy Fischer shot someone. Lorena Bobbitt cut off her husbands penis. Monica Lewinsky technically did do something (although the anger at her was very displaced). Harding didn't actually do anything other than train for the Olympics. Even if you think Harding masterminded her situation, when you consider the people involved, it's easy to believe that she never expected it to work. If you ask the average person, about Harding, you'll probably get a glib punchline and little else, and that's not really fair to her. Granted, how many other Olympic non-medal figure skaters from 20 years ago would 5/10 people on the street know by name? I don't know what the exact point I'm trying to make is, but it's all a roundabout way of saying that I, Tonya was a long time coming.

I'm just going to include a link to the Wikipedia article about "theincident" if you aren't aware of it already, because this review, like the movie, is going to be pretty useless without some of that knowledge already.

...OK, are you done reading? Good.

I, Tonya is on Tonya Harding's side. That's the most important thing to know going in. It tells the story of Tonya Harding's life before, during, and after the incident that made her infamous. All the perspectives of the story - Harding's, her mother's, her ex-husband's, etc. - are from Harding's side. Nancy Kerrigan is present in the film as little as possible. I couldn't name the actress who plays her. She has maybe one line in the movie. The idea is that while she is an innocent victim, enough people have taken her side. And let's face it, the most interesting thing about Nancy Kerrigan's story is that she crossed paths with Tonya Harding.

Harding, on the other hand, has a story worth telling even before the incident. She's a self-proclaimed redneck, who went from an abusive upbringing to an abusive marriage, and overcame just about every obstacle to become a world-class figure skater. The movie covers all of this and more pretty terrifically.

The story is told through a number of present day interviews of Harding (Margot Robbie), Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan), her mother, LaVona Golden (Allison Janney), and a few others. The film is happy to break the fourth wall in the middle of scenes to remind you that everything the audience is seeing is a recreation of one of these interviews. At no point does the film shy away from the fact that this is a truth, not the truth. I think that's why I'm less bothered by it here than in something like The Big Short, which I found smug in its assertions that it was researched and accurate. At times, I, Tonya is more Rashomon than biography, directly confronting conflicting accounts. The one thing every version of the truth agrees on is that the public has the wrong idea about what happened and who Harding is. For what it's worth, I loved the narrative device. Any fan of Parks & Rec or The Office knows that well placed interviews/testimonials keep stories moving at a good pace, simplify the storytelling, and make it easy to inject some humor: all things that I, Tonya does well.

In 2013, my introduction to Margot Robbie was in About Time and The Wolf of Wall Street. She was cast to be a gorgeous woman. The Wolf of Wall Street let her show off a little more depth than "attractive blonde", allowing her to go impressively toe to toe with Leonardo DiCaprio, and I've been curious about her ever since. Frankly, she's never been bad. Z forZachariah was a stripped down performance. She got to show off her confidence in Focus, play for some laughs in WhiskeyTango Foxtrot, play against the damsel in distress cliche in The Legend of Tarzan, and valiantly attempt to make Harley Quinn about more than her short shorts in Suicide Squad*. I, Tonya is the showcase I've been waiting for though. She gets a massive range of actions and emotions to play. It's a cliche at this point for a beautiful actress to ugly-herself up for a role to get Oscar attention, but there is a logic behind it. I think Robbie has been uniformly great as long as I've been aware of her, but playing Harding takes away any confusion about what I'm appreciating about her performance. She's just damn good. There are a few moments toward the end (before her run at the 1994 Olympics and at her Olympic hearing) that just broke me. I know that Sally Hawkins and Saorrse Ronan are the assumed Oscar frontrunners this year, but if Robbie snuck in with a win, I'd have no complaints.

*Goodbye ChristopherRobin gave her a thankless role that she was fine in but could've been played by absolutely anyone.

The whole cast is really solid though. Allison Janney has the flashy performance as Harding's withholding mother. She gets to swear inventively and has a lot of close ups in which she only ever hints at a smile. It's great work. Perhaps a bit less effective in a year that has another grizzled Emmy-winning veteran doing the same thing in a more nuanced role (Laurie Metcalf in Lady Bird). Sebastian Stan as the ex-husband has a thankless and deceptively difficult role. You have to be able to buy Jeff Gillooly as the monster Tonya makes him out to be, the mild-mannered guy he paints himself as, and the man who is in between those extremes that's probably closer to the truth. Paul Walter Hauser is the scene-stealer, playing the most extreme version of Shawn Eckhardt possible. Julianne Nicholson is Harding's skating coach, who is plucked out of a more earnest inspirational sports movie about the coach who turns a poor kid into a world champion, and thrown into the middle of this madness instead. Bobby Cannavale is a Hard Copy producer who only exists in the movie to remind the audience what the mindset of most of the people covering Harding's story was.

I think my only issue with the movie is that it spells out the point it's trying to make a little too directly. And even this I'm undecided about. I wasn't confused about the message of the movie at any point. It's not subtle even when it's trying to be. So, adding an interview scene in which Harding literally states that we are all to blame and that she was never given a fair shot is a bit much. That's something out of a script that doesn't have any faith in its audience. This does strike me as something Harding would actually say in an interview though. That makes It unneeded, not inaccurate or inauthentic. This is only a small grip though.

Overall, I think I, Tonya is great. It's like a funny version of Foxcatcher: the other side of the American dream that you don't see at the Olympics. It's never short on jokes and never loses sight of what it's trying to say. That's a tricky balance. I like that this is what Robbie is choosing to do with her production company and I hope to see more projects like it in the future. 

Verdict (?): Strongly Recommend