We all remember that Nancy Kerrigan, 1994 Winter Olympics figure skater, was attacked — struck with a metal rod, bruised and bloodied, and terrified — when rival Tonya Harding’s ex-husband Jeff Gillooly hired a hitman to eliminate Kerrigan from the competition. With that frank acknowledgment of scandalous, unprofessional, criminal behavior out of the way — Nancy is the innocent victim, do not forget that — we turn to a movie that shows Tonya is as much, if not more so, a victim.
I, Tonya, as written by Steve Rogers and directed by Craig Gillespie, is a mockumentary that purports to tell the behind-the-scenes story of The Incident and aftermath that compelled viewers worldwide that winter, just months before our attention flagged by summer and we were refreshed by OJ and his Bronco. The movie serves up a steaming heap of pathos with a heavy topping of absurdity.
And I loved every minute of the film’s sordid and unseemly mess.
Caution — again — this is not Nancy Kerrigan’s movie. Nancy’s post-attack triumph with her Olympic silver medal, followed by a career built on good will and good looks, will have to wait for a cinematic production of its own. Perhaps Disney, or Oprah, or Lifetime, will oblige…
But the movie we do have will change your view of Tonya Harding as a skater, and, more importantly, Tonya Harding as a person. Let’s face it — the reason our heads snapped when we heard about this film is that we could only imagine the train-wreck-in-action that was essentially Tonya’s life. Ice skating every four years at the Olympics is quite sufficient for my limited endurance for Salchow, Lutz and Axel, triple or otherwise, so I don’t need a feature film of more precious skating nonsense with Swan Lake or Moonlight Sonata in the air. Show me the train wreck instead.
I shamefacedly admit that I wrote a preliminary title to this review before I previewed the movie in which I, relishing my own cleverness, referred to Tonya as a “Scuzzy Skater,” figuring I knew the one-dimensional identity already.
This provocative, even if somewhat evasive, film will totally disabuse the viewer of that denigration once and for all. In fact, it will make us all complicit in the ongoing abuse and dismissal of this skater because we think we know who’s guilty. Tonya herself comments that first she was famous, then hated, then a late-night punchline. Then she turns to the audience, each of us salivating for her tawdry and titillating tale, and calmly reminds us that our very attendance at this movie makes us attackers too.
Margot Robbie as Tonya and Allison Janney as her monster-mother LaVona Golden are absolutely dazzling in their roles. They join the pantheon of mother/daughter freak shows now populated by Mommie Dearest, Autumn Sonata, Postcards from the Edge, Carrie, and a few others of that ilk. Like the tabloid-engorged readers and viewers that we are, we can’t get enough of this stuff. Shameful. We are voyeurs complicit in this whole trashy business. Please, sir, I want some more. Allison Janney and Joan Crawford can claw and scratch it out for Worst-Damn-Mother of the Century: acid tongue, public humiliation and physical abuse allowed.
With I, Tonya, it’s evident that Tonya’s competition with Nancy Kerrigan is as much, actually more, about class and presentation than skating ability. Tonya had all that Nancy had in skill, maybe more — certainly more grit — but Nancy had the look, the demeanor, the poise, and the star-quality that the skating officials wanted as representative of homogenized America. They wanted perk. In Tonya, they got prick.
As one skating coach lamented, Tonya, with her permed and frizzy hair and home-sewn rabbit-fur coat, looked like she had chopped wood before the events. Her mother immediately confirms that was indeed the case. Even Tonya’s choice of heavy metal music for her accompaniment music was a class-contrasted decision that irked the judges. Fluid, fairylike skating and ZZ Top do seem to fight against one another on the ice. She is tough and combative, like her mother, and announces her take-no-prisoners approach by smoking before the meets, then tossing the butt and using the blade of her skate to tamp it out. When judges don’t give her the points she feels she deserves, she has no hesitation to skate over to the judges’ table, looking them in the eye, and calmly suggesting “suck my dick.” This does not endear her to those who will rate and rank her skating. Ice princess she is not.
I, Tonya is a delicious, salacious romp in all its big-80s/90s-hair glory that takes us from Tonya’s ignoble beginnings to her brief time in the upper echelons of the Olympics. With that huge distance to traverse, it’s not surprising the film gives us both tragedy and farce with no distance in between. It’s a bitter melodrama soaked in black humor as she experiences the rise from the cruelest childhood imaginable (her mother won’t permit her to leave the rink to go to the bathroom, telling her just to “skate wet”) to an equally abusive marriage (“Nancy gets hit one time and the whole world shits. Me, I get hit over and over….”) to the heights of athletic prowess (the first American woman to land a triple-axle in competition), only to be plunged back into ignominious mud and sleaze (“I fall on my ass and become the butt of jokes.”)
The ancient Greeks would have approved of this kind of storytelling, where the wretched rise to great heights but fatal flaws dash them to the rocks below. It’s why we buy tabloids with screaming headlines and saturate ourselves in Jerry Springer TV, all to experience the self-inflicted misery and despair of the once-mighty. To co-opt a cliche, inquiring minds want to know, and this movie sets out to give us that story in all its stomach-wrenching detail.
Now, 20 years after that notorious Olympics, the attack, and the subsequent stripping of Tonya’s 1994 national title and her lifetime ban from competitive skating, the characters have gathered to be interviewed and tell their stories. The film may be titled I, Tonya, but there are plenty of others who have their say, too, so there’s a wide variation in this Rashomon-like memory where skater, mother, ex-husband, hitman, coach and extraneous peripherals have axes to grind and 15 minutes of fame to justify. Interspersed throughout the film is actual video footage from depositions and court testimony in the legal case that followed the attack.
Sebastian Stan plays Tonya’s worthless, shiftless husband Jeff Gillooly, who she never figures out how to quit. Remember, Jeff sold a grainy and amateurish sex tape of the couple to tabloid news show “A Current Affair,” later also marketed by Penthouse for $29.99. Jeff’s loser pal Shawn Eckhardt (Paul Walter Hauser) is his conspiracy-driven compatriot straight out of the gang that couldn’t shoot straight — one of those hackers operating from his bedroom that Trump warned us about — when a plan to send threatening letters to Nancy Kerrigan morphs into a vicious knee-capping assault. And occasionally the film breaks the sacred fourth wall as a character turns to the camera and gives us a self-serving aside, as when we’re in the midst of a sequence highlighting Tonya and Jeff’s failing marriage, and suddenly Tonya’s mother is on camera lamenting her lack of screen time with, “Well, my storyline is disappearing. What. The. Fuck.”
It’s a daft and dark comedy of our American celebrity-drenched — and stenched — culture.
It’s a quirky, Tonya-centric, irony-free, wildly contradictory quasi-documentary based on true events.
It’s a cluster-fuck of unreliable narrators stretching from White Trash Nation to Lillehammer.
Tonya Harding. Monica Lewinsky. Lorena Bobbitt. Marcia Clark. Anita Hill. Each a tabloid centerfold without airbrushing or photoshopping, each a late-night punchline, yet all flesh-and-blood women who deserve to reclaim their lives via their own movies. Tonya finally has hers. Let’s hope the others are soon in production. We need strong roles based on strong women who won’t back down.
This article appears in Dec 28, 2017 – Jan 4, 2018.
