REVIEW

I, Tonya

Margot Robbie has been nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for her role as notorious figure skater Tonya Harding in I, Tonya.
Margot Robbie has been nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for her role as notorious figure skater Tonya Harding in I, Tonya.

I never cared much about figure skating.

I was always disappointed when it was featured on ABC’s wide world of Sports on Saturday afternoons back in the day. I understood how impressive the skaters were, but I’d rather have watched the La Quebrada cliff divers, or arm wrestlers or demolition derby. I’m still that way.

The one exception was in the run-up to the 1994 Olympics, when somehow I became aware of the rivalry between America’s Sweetheart Nancy Kerrigan and the more rough-hewn Tonya Harding. Like a lot of people, I felt inclined to choose sides. Like a lot of people, I preferred Harding, who just seemed like a better story that the presumably privileged Kerrigan (who, to be fair, has never been treated especially well despite comporting herself with dignity throughout a sordid affair that she did nothing to foment). Harding was an underdog, and an outsider in a world we imagined to be prissy, spangly and highly subjective. That was enough to cheer her on.

At least until Jan. 6, 1994, when, backstage at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships at Detroit’s Cobo Arena, Kerrigan was struck on the lower left thigh with a police baton by an assailant who was probably aiming at her knee. (Kerrigan was forced to withdraw from the championships but was named to the U.S. Olympic team anyway; she recovered fairly quickly and won a silver medal in the Lillehammer games.) Her assailant was almost immediately identified as a man named Shane Stant, who was associated with Harding’s ex-husband Jeff Gillooly and his friend Shawn Eckardt.

Harding has always maintained her innocence in the plot against Kerrigan, though she eventually pleaded guilty to conspiring to hinder prosecution of the attackers. She avoided jail time. She was banned for life from United States Figure Skating Association events. She went on to become a tabloid spectacle, complete with a sex tape and a turn as a celebrity boxer. To this day, a lot of people assume she ordered the attack. And a lot of people think she got a raw deal.

If it was the latter, perhaps she shouldn’t have been surprised. Harding was always getting raw deals. When she was 15, her 26-year-old half-brother came home drunk. Finding her alone, he tried to kiss her. She burned him with a curling iron, ran upstairs and locked herself in the bathroom. He followed and broke down the door. She twisted away from him and dialed 911. She hit him in the face with a hockey stick and ran across the street to a neighbor’s house, where she called the police a second time. Her brother was arrested and spent the night in jail.

A poor girl from a fractured family, Harding somehow fixated on the most rarefied and elegant spectacle of women’s figure skating, the sport of Dorothy Hamill, Peggy Fleming and Katarina Witt. And — against all probability — she proved to have the requisite genius to excel, with explosive legs that pushed her higher than any other female skater, high enough to attempt quadruple-revolution jumps when none of her peers had yet mastered the triple axel. She melded technique with hunger, with an almost vicious appetite for victory.

Watching Craig Gillespie’s I, Tonya, I wondered why Tonya’s brother’s attempted assault wasn’t dramatized. After all, it occurred on the evening of her first date with Jeff Gillooly, the man she would later marry and divorce and with whom she would later attempt to reconcile. Maybe it would have been overload, maybe it would have disrupted the flow. Maybe there was already enough in the script to signal how awful young Tonya had it.

Gillespie’s movie is nominally a comedy, and it’s very funny. It’s also a very dark film that probes at some tender places in our culture. Tonya (a magnificent Margot Robbie, in an award-worthy role that seems likely to change popular perception) is a wild and pure product of America, the sort that William Carlos Williams observed “go crazy.” She has the hyper-competitiveness of a world-class athlete, the toughness of a Bowery bouncer, and a sly if underdeveloped intelligence while somehow maintaining an almost sweet vulnerability. This Tonya is a genuinely sympathetic character, one who commands (and maybe even deserves) our investment.

Tonya’s mother, LaVona Golden (an unflinching Allison Janney, also in line for award buzz), was simply beastly to her, the sort of nightmare parent to push a child out into a hostile environment to flounder or dominate, withholding validation on the pretext of making them tougher. No wonder she tries to escape into the arms of the dull Gillooly (Sebastian Stan), who seems bright only compared to his running buddies, chief among them mouth-breathing conspiracy monger Shawn Eckhardt (Paul Walter Hauser) who — the film suggests, anyway — took it upon himself to kneecap Kerrigan to increase Tonya’s chances at Olympic glory.

Presented as a mockumentary, it features staged interviews with the actors using statements made by their real-life analogs and the same sort of fourth wall-breaking recently seen in Adam McKay’s The Big Short and Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (both of which, coincidentally, featured Robbie) to annotate disputed and contradictory accounts.

To give myself credit for a little prescience, back in 1994, I wrote a column that compared Harding’s story to Peter Bogdanovich’s Star 90, and Gillespie’s film feels a little like that. It also feels a little like To Die For, the 1995 Gus Van Sant movie that made me reconsider Nicole Kidman.

Some people will see I, Tonya as a kind of cutesy attack on Harding, as yet another mistreatment of her. It doesn’t feel that way. It feels affectionate. It feels clear-eyed and cognizant of all the complications surrounding the character, but not especially cruel. It’s fun to watch, and only later, contemplating the realness of the story, does it seem intractably sad.

I, Tonya

89 Cast: Margot Robbie, Sebastian Stan, Allison Janney, Paul Walter Hauser, Julianne Nicholson, Bobby Cannavale, Mckenna Grace Director: Craig Gillespie

Rating: R, for scenes of violence, including intense spousal abuse Running time: 2 hours

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