Film review: Give Margot Robbie the gold for I, Tonya
NeonThe Suicide Squad actress makes the disgraced figure skater sympathetic and eminently watchable, writes critic Caryn James.
This doesn’t seem to be the moment for a biopic burnishing the reputation of a once-reviled public figure. While we’re being flooded with new sexual assault accusations, viewers might be hungry for escapism and wholesome heroes. But Margot Robbie’s performance as disgraced champion figure skater Tonya Harding is so energetic, vivid and entertaining that I, Tonya overcomes the challenge of redeeming its problematic heroine.
The real Harding is a footnote to pop-culture history. Once, she was among the world’s most famous, accomplished skaters. She fell from that pinnacle when Jeff Gillooly, by then her ex-husband, set in motion a knee-capping attack at the US Figure Skating Championships on Harding’s rival, Nancy Kerrigan, hoping to keep her out of the 1994 Winter Olympics just seven weeks later.
Director Craig Gillespie deftly combines Harding’s dramatic story – about class, physical abuse and fierce determination – with black comedy about celebrity and about the bumbling attack on Kerrigan. But it is Robbie who gives the film its heart. She captures the contradictions, not of Harding’s public image, but of her self-image: part defiant heroine, part self-pitying victim.
Harding, as the film points out, was coarse-talking and tacky-looking in a sport that expects its champions to be sleek bunheads; ballerinas on ice. The film lets us see her negative traits. She is petulant and constantly whines, “That wasn’t my fault.” But it presents those flaws as forgivable. Or at least Tonya thinks they are. The film’s conceit is that she is being interviewed, and the events we see are largely her version of the story.
At the start, Robbie is 44-year-old Tonya, sitting at her kitchen table, coughing and smoking, her asthma inhaler at hand. Talking to the camera, she is so unapologetic that she actually says, “I never apologised for growin’ up poor or bein’ a redneck. It’s just what I am.” She looks frazzled and tired – as she had, in fact, 20 years earlier at the height of her career. As convincing as Robbie is when playing the younger Tonya, these scenes of her as a middle-aged has-been are the most wrenching.
Steven Rogers’ screenplay is based on two contradictory interviews he did with Harding and her ex-husband. Sebastian Stan, as Gillooly, speaks to the camera at times too. So does Tonya’s abusive mother, LaVona (Allison Janney), her ladylike skating coach, Diane (Julianne Nicholson) and Jeff’s best friend, Shawn Eckhardt (Paul Walter Ha), the film’s main source of comedy. Shawn is so moronic he claims to be a counterterrorism expert operating out of his room in his parents’ house. Used sparingly, the direct-to-camera interviews work to punctuate Tonya’s story.
Janney, with a parrot on her shoulder in the interview scenes and a most unfortunate bowl haircut throughout the film, tears into the role of this tyrant, but there’s nothing nuanced about the character. When Tonya is a girl, LaVona hits her with a hairbrush. She later insists, “She skated better when she was enraged,” and eventually throws a knife at her during an argument.
Stranger than fiction
Tonya escapes by marrying Jeff Gillooly. “He was the only boy I ever loved,” she says, then turns to the camera after we see him smash her head against a wall mirror, shattering it to pieces. “The only catch was, he beat the living hell out of me.”
“I never hit her,” Gillooly says in an interview. But this is Tonya’s story, and we find ourselves believing her. As Gillooly, Stan finds just the right balance, making him a hothead in the past, calm and matter-of-fact as he looks back, the less reliable narrator.
The skating scenes reveal how good Harding was. Robbie trained for months, but Tonya’s routines are a triumph of spectacularly quick editing, by turns speeded up or slowed down. The camera swirls, blurring the skater’s face so it is hard (not impossible) to tell Robbie from the stunt doubles.
Tonya’s attitude is more important, though. She belligerently challenges judges about a score she thinks is too low. When they sneer at her inelegant, home-made outfit, she yells, “If you can come up with $5,000 for a costume then I won’t have to make one!”
Gillespie (doing his best work since he directed Lars and the Real Girl) smoothly moves into comic territory with the knee-bashing incident. Jeff concocts a plan which Shawn orchestrates as only an idiot could, hiring men so inept they start by going to the wrong city.
The film s the idea that Shawn was the rogue culprit, that Jeff and Tonya only meant to unnerve Kerrigan with death threats. Who knew what, and when, remains murky in real life. But among the plan’s failures: Kerrigan won a silver medal at the ’94 Olympics, Harding finished eighth and in the aftermath of the attack ultimately was barred from professional skating.
Robbie makes Tonya so sympathetic that it’s easy to gloss over the film’s major flaws. It ignores a basic question: why wouldn’t someone as ambitious as Tonya play along with the skating game, tame her hair, tone down her angry outbursts and not perform to heavy metal as her coach urged her to do? The idea that everyone has his or her version of the truth, which Tonya too-explicitly states, is both conventional and a convenient excuse for the film to not ask tougher questions.
Near the movie’s end, Tonya has become a joke to the public. Looking into the camera, she says, “It was like being abused all over again, only this time by you. All of you. You’re all my attackers too.” The lines are meant to evoke a visceral reckoning from us as viewers, and to stand as another example of Tonya’s “not my fault” posture. It works better as the second of those. The film gives too little weight to its heroine’s complicity.
We see her immediate post-skating life, a brief time as a boxer. She does it for the money, she says, but it’s also a way of holding onto fame. The scenes are undeniably sad but actually, yes, her fault. No one coerced her into boxing, limited though her options were.
The final sequence juxtaposes her dazzling moments on ice with images of her in the boxing ring, bloodied on the mat. She’s taking punches, as she had her whole life, this time in a futile attempt to reclaim some tarnished glory. I, Tonya finally gives her that.
★★★★☆
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