Tonya Harding biopic 'I, Tonya' turns a portrait of a punchline into a mirror of ourselves
Toward the end of I, Tonya, an older Tonya Harding reflects back on her skating career. "I was loved for a minute, and then I was hated, and then I was a punchline forever," she says.
I probably don't need to tell you what, specifically, she's talking about – the 1994 attack on Nancy Kerrigan made Harding that notorious, to the point that we're making movies about it in the year 2017.
But I, Tonya, written by Steven Rogers and directed by Craig Gillespie, isn't interested in a simple play-by-play of the incident we're all familiar with already. Rather, it's about the "irony free, wildly contradictory, totally true" story of how Tonya got to that fateful moment and what happened once she got there. It's interested in subjective truths, in class differences, in our national self-image, and in our cultural obsession with scandal and celebrity.
Tonya may have been a punchline, but as presented in I, Tonya, the hard facts of her life actually read like a tragedy. Hers is a story of loving what could not or would not love her back. She grew up with an abusive mother, then married an abusive husband.
Skating was the only thing that ever mattered to her, the only thing she was ever good at, but skating didn't want her. The sport demanded, as I, Tonya, puts it, "an old-timey version of what a woman's supposed to be": a prim, pretty, proper princess. Tonya was seen as "white trash," and even her killer triple axel couldn't quite make up for that.
You could tell that story straight and serve up a grim, gritty drama. I, Tonya doesn't go that route. Instead, it recalls exactly why we used to laugh at Harding's story, with its buffoonish cast of working-class characters, and it makes us laugh all over again. This time, though, it asks us to consider what we're laughing and leering at, and why.
I, Tonya redeems its subject from the depths of cartoon villainy that we'd condemned her to, but it doesn't turn her into a misunderstood hero or a mere victim of circumstance, either. It just asks us to consider Tonya as a human being.
Margot Robbie doesn't much resemble Harding, and I'll leave it to people who remember the skater's mannerisms better than I do to judge how well she mimics them. But similarities (or lack thereof) to the real Harding aside, her performance here is yet another reminder that Robbie is one of the finest actors of her generation.
The performance everyone will be talking about, though, is Allison Janney's as Harding's hard, mean mother. At first, she just seems like a colorful comic character – the type who'll do entire interviews with a bird on her shoulder which she refers to as her sixth, and best, husband. As we see more of her relationship with Tonya, though, Janney reveals more of the cruelty and bitterness that drives LaVona.
I, Tonya doesn't always strike the right balance between comedy and tragedy. For instance, while scenes of Tonya being abused are not played for laughs, the context surrounding them (like the fact that they're being perpetrated by characters we find amusing) prevent them from having as strong an emotional impact as they probably should.
But at the end of it all, we're left with an memorable portrait of Harding, one that significantly complicates the impression of her that was burned into our minds in the '90s. It turns that image back around on us and asks what it tells us about ourselves.
Tonya, as her skating coach (Julianne Nicholson) puts it, was, from start to finish, "totally American." Whether we like it or not.
