I, Tonya

Directed By: Craig GillespieWritten By: Steven Rogers Starring: Margot Robbie, Sebastian

Stan, Allison Janney, Paul Walter Hauser

Never have I seen a film based on a real-life story, make such a point of knowing so few of the facts.

I, Tonya, the tragicomic recounting of the improbable rise and calamitous fall of former figure skating champion Tonya Harding, is a film which has a peculiar relationship with “truth.” From the outset, Steven Rogers’ dexterous screenplay aims to deconstruct truth’s viability in a sleazy, pop-culture sphere; “there’s no such thing as truth” Tonya narrates to us at one point. For Tonya, truth, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder; “everyone has their own.”

Tonya’s truth is that her role in the attack on fellow skater Nancy Kerrigan—the bizarre event which led to Tonya’s lifetime ban from her beloved figure skating—is tenuously tangential at best. The media’s truth, and the truth that the rest of the world not just ate up, but licked the plate clean of, was one that had Tonya crucified and consigned to the fate of a walking punchline; in perhaps the film’s most gutting moment, staring down the camera’s barrel, Tonya implicates each and every one of us in the disintegration of her life—“you were my attackers” she states, bruised and anguished. There’s something alarming about seeing our own reflections in such a light.

Rogers’ screenplay scrapes together what kernels of truth it can and arranges them via the mockumentary accounts of those central to the scandal—a trio composed of Harding herself (Margot Robbie), her then husband Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan), and Harding’s belligerent mother LaVona (Allison Janney). Evidently, Rogers relishes the farcically in-concrete nature of it all; “based on irony-free, wildly contradictory, totally true interviews” reads I, Tonya’s opening onscreen text, those contradictions taken as an invitation by the filmmakers to gleefully play it fast and loose with the facts, director Craig Gillespie wringing the impasse between what’s shown and what’s said for as much jet-black humour and off-kilter panache as he can; “I never did this” Tonya informs us through a shattered fourth wall, right as she pops off another round from her shotgun earmarked for her fleeing husband.

It might seem irresponsible for filmmakers to so irreverently handle one’s real-life story, but that irreverence is precisely the point. In a world of sleazy tabloid media and a pop-culture that loves to hate, truth skates in a distant second to compelling melodrama, and Gillespie and Rogers frame their film accordingly. It’s also an approach tonally befitting of the madcap, he-said-she-said lunacy of the whole saga, allowing the makers to acknowledge the glaring holes in the narrative’s continuity, whilst still paying overdue sympathy to Mrs Harding.

And I, Tonya is, for all its affectionate mocking, a deeply sympathetic account. And why wouldn’t it be. Tonya Harding might have been the ultimate underdog had she not met certain people at certain times. Scratch the obvious blemishes, and this is a feel-good, rise-against-adversity sports epic.

Tonya Harding: a dreamer who rose from slummy, “white trash” depths, deprived of the requisite wholesome American family from which each of her competitor’s heralded, to become at one point in time the best figure skater in the world; the first (and to this day one of the only) to land a triple axel. And she rose to such heights out of an impossibly abusive ecosystem, tormented from day one, physically and mentally, by her demonic mother (inhabited to petrifying and occasionally comic fullness by Janney, one hand wrapped around a Best Support Actress Oscar), and then by the man, Gillooly, who looked for a time as though he might whisk her away on a white horse.

But rise Tonya did, improbable as it was, only to have her successes ripped out from underneath her by the idiocy of her then-husband, and his deluded, slobby right hand Shawn Eckhardt (Paul Walter Hauser), who together stumble upon engineering the attack on Nancy Kerrigan like a couple of dim-witted prospectors who fall down a goldmine.

There’s more than a hint of comical farce to the whole ordeal, one which Gillespie wisely plays for laughs. There’s more than a hint of the Coen Brothers’ penchant for numbskulls caught in the whirlwind of their own buffoonery too, just as there is the bustling, rock ’n’ roll urgency of a Scorsese crime epic, replete with an abundance of protagonist narration and episodic, period accurate needle-drops (although Gillespie’s song choices are decidedly less creative than Scorsese’s.)

Inevitably, Gillespie’s stylistic strokes are broader and less vivacious than those of the directors he borrows from. For all its breaking the fourth wall, kinetic pacing and ferocity, I, Tonya neither captures that ubiquitous Scorsesean fizz, nor the deliciously untethered sense of Coen Brothers mayhem. Instead, Gillespie unloads his stylistic tricks more out of apparent, dutiful pastiche rather than actual-realisation; there’s simply not as much vitality behind ‘s flourishes.

What Gillespie does do is skate between tragicomedy and genuine pathos with an unlikely grace befitting of his central character. Much of that pathos hinges on Margot Robbie— an actress who’s made a swift habit of subverting expectations in her still young Hollywood career—  and her powerful turn as Tonya. What Robbie lacks in Tonya’s other-side-of-the-tracks coarseness, she more than makes up for in quiet humanity and vulnerability. Scenes in which Tonya begs for prison time rather than a ban from skating are not only stirring, but gut-wrenching and devastating; they strip Tonya of her years of press assigned villainy and caricature, and expose underneath it all a very real person, one who, for the first time, we may understand. Therein lays I, Tonya’s crowning achievement—Robbie, Gillespie and Rogers mightn’t be able to lift Tonya’s ban from figure skating, but together they have rehabbed her image like no others have even attempted, plunging us into the often depraved world in which she was dropped, and lending, even without the facts, an emotional clarity to arguably America’s greatest sporting scandal. It helps that the film is also pretty entertaining, in a rollicking, high-octane sort of way.

Rating:

3/4