I, Tonya (2017) review

Dir. Craig Gillespie

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★★½

When it comes to a popular story, be it one revolving around pop culture, politics, murder, or entertainment, I either know close to everything about it or I know nothing at all. Until I learned that a biopic on former figure skater Tonya Harding was in production, I thought Harding was a singer of some sort all this time. I had no idea of her and her incendiary personality, and absolutely no inkling as to what transpired in Detroit in 1994 when Nancy Kerrigan was attacked by associates of Harding and her husband.

Thankfully, Craig Gillespie (Lars and the Real Girl, Million Dollar Arm) has made a film as edgy and as entertaining as Tonya Harding herself, so the few people like me can learn the specifics of the troubled skater’s career. For the rest of the masses who vividly recall Harding’s emphatic rise and graceless fall, Gillespie’s I, Tonya gives you all the scandal and gossip-laden tone you could ever want. He and writer Steven Rogers do the unthinkable by first getting us to recognize that we probably don’t know Harding’s entire story like we think we do (similar to how many likely don’t know who Stella Liebeck is, although they are quick to say her suing McDonald’s after her coffee spilled on her crotch was egregious abuse of the legal system). We know the sensationalized accounts and the main components of Harding’s story, but we don’t know her background, her relationships, or anything outside of the fact that we loved watching her skate and we relished in her fumbling her young life away like we so often do.

Here, she’s played by Margot Robbie in a career-making performance. Robbie, who has shown flashes of potential greatness in films like The Wolf of Wall Street and Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, finally gets a crack at a character she can embody. The result is a fearless revelation worthy of all the acclaim and accolades that will come in the next few months. Robbie is the kind of actress that you could see confidently taking a maligned public figure to portray in a rather empathetic docudrama with her simple assurance along the lines of, “just watch how I handle this” being all you need to know before watching her knock the performance out of the park.

Before we see Robbie give one of the year’s best performances, we watch a four-year-old Tonya (played by Gifted‘s Mckenna Grace) endure years of ruthless skating lessons at the persistence of her domineering mother LaVona, played by a terrific Allison Janney (who rivals Laurie Metcalf for best performance as a helicopter mother of the year). Her mother pushes her with neglect and abuse to transcend the average princess-look of an American figure skater in order to stand out and stick landings no other skater would even attempt. In her mid-teens she meets Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan), whom she marries despite his own physically and mentally abusive habits in effort to break free from her mother and get some form of independence. Jeff is by her side nonetheless when she competes in the Winter Olympics, earning high-marks but not ones high enough to overcome the flagrant biases of the judges. They view Tonya as a white-trash byproduct of a podunk community with no business being on the ice competing with more, say, photogenic skaters that effectively turn the Olympics into a beauty pageant on ice.

Out of stress and fear, and in lieu of receiving a death threat, Tonya conjures up a plan with Jeff to keep Nancy Kerrigan (Caitlin Carver), one of the prettier, more favored skaters in the 1994 Olympics, on her toes in the wake of the competition. Jeff decides to enlist in the help of his friend and Tonya’s bodyguard Shawn Eckhardt (Paul Walter Hauser) and some of his associates to send some threatening letters to Nancy to weaken her confidence. Miscommunications and the unthinkable ineptitude of Shawn’s guys lead to things going a step further with one of them striking Nancy’s knee with a retractable baton, breaking her leg days before the competition. This thrusts Tonya and Jeff into a media firestorm of responsibility and involvement that takes even more of the attention off of the competition, what Tonya originally wished it was all about in the first place.