I, Tonya

I, Tonya

Starring Margot Robbie, Sebastian Stan, Allison Janney, Paul Walter Hauser

Directed by Craig Gillespie

The Story:
As a child, Tonya Harding had a strong desire to skate, and her overbearing, abusive mother LaVona (Allison Janney) gets her into an ice skating class, where she quickly rises the ranks and out-performs even the seasoned veterans.  Years later, now an adult, Tonya (Margot Robbie) is at the top of her game, and falling in love with Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan), despite the fact that he continually abuses her.

After she becomes the second female to land the triple axel jump, Harding rose to fame and notoriety, and was someone who could've gone to the Olympics.  However, as she allowed her private life to affect her performance - and receiving negative feedback from judges who wanted a more wholesome image - she began to fade to obscurity again.

That is, until 1994, when Gillooly and his friend Shawn Eckhardt (Paul Walter Hauser) pay a man to prevent Harding's biggest competition - Nancy Kerrigan (Caitlin Carver) - from participating in the Olympic qualifier.  What happened next is the stuff of legend, turning Tonya Harding's once promising career to an eternal joke.

The Synopsis:
I've never been one who's been interested in sports, but even I remember that infamous moment in 1994 when Nancy Kerrigan was attacked, leaving her badly injured when a hitman struck her in the thigh with a police baton.  That incident propelled the female figure skating world to worldwide prominence, and caused the 1994 Winter Olympics to have one of its highest-rated events ever.  Everyone tuned in to see not only Kerrigan's big comeback, but how Tonya Harding would fare, since she was the prime suspect in the hit, after her husband was accused of organizing it with her knowledge.

Now that Harding's name has obscured into the history books, director Craig Gillespie decided it was time to once again tell her true story - well, for the most part anyway.  This tongue-in-cheek faux-documentary style film opens with the title card "based on irony-free, wildly contradictory and totally true interviews with Tonya Harding and Jeff Gillooly," and fully expounds on that notion as the filmmakers "interview" Harding, Gillooly, and other players of this fascinating farce.  Harding remarks that "there's no such thing as truth.  Everyone has their own truth," and that's expressed when we see Harding and Gillooly's stories vastly contradicting one another's.  Is this a true story based wholly on factual data and analysis?  Of course not.  It doesn't even pretend to be.  What it is, it seems, is a tongue-in-cheek dark comedy that turns the real people into hysterical caricatures of country bumpkins, while somehow vindicating Tonya Harding herself.

We see Tonya's troubled life from an early age, when her mother - who constantly drinks, smokes, and beats on her child - takes her to an ice skating rink and demands the teacher take her in.  She balls her little eyes out when her father leaves, begging him to take her, but her request falls on deaf ears.  As she grows up and continues skating, she faces the prejudices of the other skaters - namely, she's poor, and can't afford fancy costumes.  This hinders her ability with the judges to attain better scores, and she earns a bad girl persona due to her standoffish nature. 

Then she meets Jeff Gillooly, and things go from bad to worse.  Now she's being beaten by him, so hard that he smashes her head against a mirror and shatters it, breaks her nose, and holds a gun on her.  Yet she chooses to stay with him despite continually gaining restraining orders against him.  She also continues to rise among the ranks of figure skaters, becoming a force to be reckoned with after she nails a triple axel maneuver - something only one other female has been able to do.  This would be enough to send any figure skater to international super-stardom, but Harding's personality constantly clashes with the judges and she has to keep working to earn their respect.

Then...as all the main characters even attest...comes "the incident."  We see this play out when Jeff and his friend Shawn hire two men to supposedly just send Kerrigan death threats, but they take things too far.  We see Harding having little to no interaction with the plan, and it seemingly comes from the dim-witted minds of Jeff and Shawn's friend.  We then see the repercussions that reverberate throughout Harding's life, and how it dragged her down and made her a laughing-stock of the world.  In the end, we actually feel bad for her.  Sure, she's not the picture perfect role model of a figure skater (always police and nice, well-groomed, and dressed eloquently), but she speaks her mind and doesn't lie down in the face of opposition.

What sets this film apart from a generic wannabe Lifetime Original movie is in the stellar performances.  Sebastian Stan never worked better than playing Jeff Gillooly, a man who's basically inept at anything and everything to do with living.  His equally bumbling sidekick Shawn is played to pure delight by Paul Walter Hauser, who is easily the stupidest person you could ever meet.  Together, they somehow hatch a plan that of course goes every wrong way, and poor Harding has to pay the price.

The two standout performances are by Allison Janney and Margot Robbie, both of whom already garnered Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild nominations - and undoubtedly will also add Oscar nominations to that list.  Janney totally transforms herself into Tonya's mother, who is extremely overbearing, insensitive, crude, rude, and plain nasty to Tonya and everyone else around her - but yet she also gives a hint of sadness deep inside that crusty outer shell.  Personally, she's never been better.

The same goes for Margot Robbie.  She's one of the best actresses to come around in awhile, and she has visibly transformed herself in whatever role she takes on.  From her start in "The Wolf of Wall Street" to Harley Quinn in "Suicide Squad," to Jane in "The Legend of Tarzan" and Daphne Milne in "Goodbye Christopher Robin," Robbie has an uncanny way of turning into the character she plays so well that we don't see her acting, but it's like we see that character come to life.  She continues that trend as Tonya Harding, portraying her as a gruff, no-nonsense woman who also suffers from the abuse given to her by her mother and future husband, but also the abuse from upstart judges and the world as a whole.  Yet she never shies away and disappears, but she faces her encounters head on with a strange mixture of confidence and insecurity, of the utmost highs and the utter lows, that gives Harding more than just a one-dimensional tone.  Surprisingly, Robbie makes us feel empathy and sadness for this fallen ice queen, something not easy to do.

The filming style of "I, Tonya" is unique in that it's done in a faux-documentary style, as the filmmakers "interview" several key players in Harding's life.  Gillooly is filmed with a pretty backdrop, and he sounds like a total buffoon.  Harding is shot in a messy kitchen, wearing a jean jacket and cowboy boots, as she occasionally takes a drag from a cigarette.  LaVona is filmed with a bird on her shoulder (funny aside: Janney isn't a bird person, and hated having the bird on her shoulder as a prop) and attached to a breathing apparatus from decades of chain smoking, and she's as defiant as ever.  The film also does great work at breaking the coveted "Fourth Wall" as characters often look at the camera during events and narrate what's happening to the audience.  Essentially, this film isn't just about the Nancy Kerrigan incident, but about Tonya Harding's life, told through the lens of three distinctly different people.  

The Summary:
Far from the made-for-TV movie that came out after the "incident," "I, Tonya" is a passioned faux-story of the tumultuous life of figure skating's first bad girl, delivered with a surprising amount of grace by Margot Robbie, who actually makes us feel for this rebel with a cause.

The Score: A+