The very dark comedy I, Tonya, based somewhat loosely on the memoir by Tonya Harding with many winks and nods to the audience, garnered acting nominations for lead actress Margot Robbie and supporting actress Allison Janney (who won) as well as a nomination for film editing, with some critics anticipating a Best Picture nod as well. It is a perfectly solid film, a B+ or a grade 55, funny in several parts, disturbing in a few others, and benefits from a tremendous performance not by Janney (who’s fine, but one-note) but by Robbie, as well as a story that is itself just really damn good. You can rent or buy it now on iTunes or amazon.
For those of you too young to remember this fiasco, here’s the quick recap: Tonya Harding was one of the best ladies figure skaters in the world in 1991, and only the second woman ever to land the jump known as a triple axel. She went to the 1992 Olympics in Albertville, finishing fourth, and might not have skated again for the U.S. were it not for the IOC’s decision in 1988 to move up the next Winter Games to 1994, awarding them to Lillehammer, Norway. (The film screws with this timeline to make it appear that the IOC decided to move the next Winter Games up after Albertville.) In the lead to those games, someone in Harding’s circle hatched the cockamamie idea to kneecap her primary competition for a spot on the Olympic team, Nancy Kerrigan. That knocked Kerrigan out of the Nationals; Harding won the event and a spot, while the USOC awarded the second spot to Kerrigan. Meanwhile, because the men behind the kneecapping scheme were some of the dumbest hoods imaginable, they were all caught rather quickly, and Harding ended up taking some of the blame even though at the time she claimed she had no knowledge at all of any plan to injure Kerrigan. She had a disastrous performance in Lillehammer; Kerrigan earned a silver medal, as Ukraine’s Oksana Baiul won the gold.
The movie version focuses as much on what came before the 1994 Olympics as it does on what every character in the film resignedly calls “the Incident.” Harding’s mother (played by Janney) gets the Mommie Dearest treatment; she’s depicted as verbally and physically abusive, chain-smoking, day-drinking, and just generally an unlikeable battle-axe who, for all her flaws, will push for her daughter to get the training and opportunities to succeed as a figure skater. Harding, it turns out, was born with great strength and athletic ability, but never had the ‘grace’ that characterized so many figure skaters of the time – and the scoring system prior to the 2002 Salt Lake City Games’ vote-trading scandal was a corrupt, impenetrable joke, so judges could and did play favorites with various skaters. The film makes it clear that judges penalized Harding for being (in the script’s words) white trash, because she wasn’t dressed in expensive costumes and didn’t skate all pretty-like as Kerrigan did. (I always found Kerrigan to be technically skilled but boring to watch; Surya Bonali, who was a contemporary of those two, was by far more entertaining, and would often perform illegal backflips on the ice, which I interpreted as a sort of fuck-you to the judges who seemed to just plain dislike her for being big, or strong, or black.)
Robbie is incredible here as Harding; I’ve said this a few times, but 2017 was an absolute banner year for performances by actresses, with Robbie joining the list of at least five I’d say were worthy of Best Actress in a typical year. The hair and makeup are amusing enough, but Robbie nails a certain tenor to her voice and movements that reflects Harding’s background – or at least the version of Harding’s life that she wants us to hear. Janney was considered a shoo-in for Best Supporting Actress from early on in the process, but I thought the character was monotonous, and I don’t think she faced the challenge that Laurie Metcalf did in playing a more complex character in Lady Bird. (I’d probably also put Janney behind Lesley Manville for Phantom Thread.)
Sebastian Stan plays Jeff Gillooly, Harding’s abusive husband, looking like Rivers Cuomo with a taped-on mustache, and provides a dueling and somewhat differing narrative alongside what Harding tells the camera. Stan is superb, and both he and Robbie make the film’s core gimmick, of having characters break the fourth wall mid-scene, often with a moving camera shot, to explain that what we’re seeing didn’t happen or provide other details, work far better than I would have expected. That fourth-wall bit could go very wrong, but here it makes the film funnier and gives the script some more rope for scenes that seem a little beyond the pale. The movie also benefits from a hilariously spot-on performance by Paul Walter Hauser as Shawn Eckhardt, the fat, nerdy friend of Gillooly’s who hired the doofus hit men, and later gave an interview to Diane Sawyer where he claimed to be an international counterterrorism expert and otherwise showed that he was out of his mind. (He died about ten years ago; Gillooly later changed his name to Jeff Stone and disappeared, although Amy Nelson, writing for Deadspin, tracked him down in 2013.)
Harding’s story may not be true; other participants in it have denied her versions of events, and she even implied in an interview this January that she knew “something” was up, even if she didn’t actually order the hit. What seems beyond dispute, however, is that she was a victim of abuse, likely from both her mother and then Gillooly (which fits, as childhood victims are more likely to end up in abusive relationships as adults). In the script, Harding keeps telling us how various things aren’t her fault, and her mother tells us and tells Harding that she keeps blaming setbacks on everyone but herself. If, however, Harding is a trauma victim, then … well, yeah, that’s something trauma victims do to cope. And sometimes they lie, because dealing with the truth means revisiting aspects of past trauma. And of course they make bad decisions. I, Tonya may not have explicitly set out to make viewers feel sorry for its subject, but I certainly did. Whether she deserved the de facto death penalty she received from U.S. Skating – which I notice hasn’t commented on the film, unsurprising as its judges are made out to be snobbish, elitist asshats – is a bit beside the point, as she wasn’t going to the ‘98 Olympics anyway. The question is how history should view Harding; she says she turned into a punch line, while I think other accounts view her as a villain. If you accept nothing more in this film but the general gist of her life prior to Lillehammer, however, you have to see her as a victim first before she’s anything else.
I was a little uncomfortable with how I, Tonya used that violence for occasional laughs, or would shift its tone mid-scene from abuse to sight gag or fourth-wall-breaking, even when the switch was there to allow viewers to empathize more with Harding. There are many parts of this story that are genuinely funny – anything involving Eckhardt and the two nitwits he ‘hired’ to do the job – but the parts with Harding and her mother are truly horrifying, as is much of Harding’s time with Gillooly. The script also assumes too much on the part of the viewer around Harding’s marriage and why she stayed in that relationship, which risks putting too much blame on Harding (“why didn’t she just leave?”) when the answer isn’t that simple. The secondary theme, about how the U.S. Skating oligarchy wanted no part of a woman skater who came from outside their infrastructure and wasn’t a dainty waif dressed in frills, is also underplayed in the script; it’s less salacious than a dimwitted conspiracy to break Nancy Kerrigan’s knee, but it’s more insidious and wasn’t addressed at all until a global scandal blew up the biased scoring system. Harding’s life plays out for plenty of laughs in I, Tonya, but in the final reckoning it’s just not that funny.