I, Tonya **** / *****
Directed by: Craig Gillespie.
Written by: Steven Rogers.
Starring: Margot Robbie (Tonya Harding), Sebastian Stan (Jeff Gillooly), Allison Janney (LaVona Golden), Julianne Nicholson (Diane Rawlinson), Paul Walter Hauser (Shawn Eckhardt), Mckenna Grace (Young Tonya Harding), Bobby Cannavale (Hard Copy Reporter), Bojana Novakovic (Dody Teachman), Caitlin Carver (Nancy Kerrigan), Jason Davis (Al Harding), Anthony Reynolds (Derrick Smith), Ricky Russert (Shane Stant).
You can say a lot of things about Tonya Harding – most of them, not flattering – but you have to admit that she really was close to having one of the greatest underdog sports stories ever. She grew up poor, with abusive or absent parents, got married very young – to a man who may well have abused her as well, and was still, at one point, one of the very best figure skaters in the world. While her competitors got to focus on nothing other than skating, she had to work, and deal with an insane family. None of this excuses what happened – but it certainly makes her interesting. She really is the reason why “the incident” became such a massive media event – and she’s the reason why it’s remembered. Nancy Kerrigan is better remembered for that incident than anything else – which is completely unfair to her, but also true. She’s boring – Harding most definitely is not. I, Tonya is probably the best feature film version of this story that you could ask for – and it’s done in the perfect style for it. The vast majority of the action takes place in the early to mid-1990s, so director Craig Gillespie basically decides to make a film directly from that era. You can see a lot of GoodFellas-era Scorsese influence, a little Coen brother mixture of mockery and humanity, and a lot of Gus Van Sant’s To Die For in the film as well. What happens in the film is so insane you would never in a million years believe it, if it was not true. But – of course – it is.
Margot Robbie plays Harding, and it’s a performance that once and for all should prove to everyone just how good she is (I was convinced after The Wolf of Wall Street – and in general, I don’t think she’s been bad in anything, even if the movie sucked). Yes, she’s too old to play Harding starting at 15, but you get over that pretty quick. This is a brash performance – mixing humor with humanity, and more than a healthy dose of self-delusion (Harding never thought she was responsible for anything, ever). The film requires a lot of Robbie – and she carries it well. As her infamous husband/manager Jeff Gilloly, Sebastian Stan is quite good as well – looking awful with a horrible mustache, the film has him flash between sweetly dim, and violent and abusive (the film is structured like a documentary, with various people telling their stories, and then we see those scenes, so you get different version of the people). The best performance in the movie belongs to Allison Janney as Harding’s mother LaVona – you wouldn’t say that she humanizes her – LaVona is clearly a monster, abusive, belittling and controlling, but you get to see what makes her tick. The various guys involving in the actual crime are all convincingly played as a gaggle of idiots – none more so than Paul Walter Hauser as Gilloly’s best friend Shawn – the “body guard and international terrorism expert”. He is hilarious in every scene he’s in.
I, Tonya does a great job at walking that fine line between mockery and simply portraying its characters. It would be easy to mock many of them – they are not smart, they are delusional, and from 25 years in the future, the dress and style themselves horribly. The film is certainly funny – it has to be given everything that happens – but it also positions itself well in terms of explaining why this story caught the way it did back then – and what that may mean about us today. The film never gets overt about it – but we see what the story that knocked Harding out of the headlines was, and we know what that means – and we see what she did in later years. She was a reality TV star before reality TV.
The film is also, it must be said, just extremely entertaining – an absolute blast from beginning to end. If you’re going to make a film about this subject, you have to fully embrace its inherent sleaziness – and this film does just that. It’s a film that keeps you laughing while watching it – and only really sinks in later.
