I, Tonya
Big, bold, brash and beautiful, I, Tonya is a circus of colourful costumes, colourful language, violence and audacity. Things get a little icy in this volatile biopic of US skater Tonya Harding’s rise to fame and disastrous fall from grace that is equal parts unique and totally predictable.
Margot Robbie (Suicide Squad) brings barrels of fun and buckets of complexity in her role as Tonya and is a genuine pleasure to watch, from (unrealistically) playing Tonya at 15 years old, through the lofty heights of celebrity, to the crashing and burning of a global scandal and a short-lived career as a professional boxer, she will steal your breath with triple axels, sucker-punches and heat-felt monologues. Tonya’s world is a suffocating one and Robbie will tie your heartstrings into knots as you watch her struggle to escape the mould that her mother and husband beat her into, and battle to break her way into an industry hell-bent on discriminating against her redneck upbringing.
Allison Janney (Juno) delivers a knock-out performance as Tonya’s tough-talking, hard-smoking, no-nonsense mum/coach/enemy. Janney takes you from the hilarity of talking to her parrot as if he were her sixth husband, to scaring the living bejesus out of you, all just by moving one muscle in her face. She takes ‘pokerface’ to whole new heights and there is no doubt that, had they met, she would have mopped the floor with Le Chiffre in a game of Blackjack.
Sebastian Stan (Captain America) is intensely dislikeable as Tonya’s violent, dangerously stupid and emotionally manipulative husband Jeff, but he should still be begrudgingly awarded credit for bringing the odd smidgen of warmth and vulnerability to what could easily have become a walking, talking stereotype of hayseed misogyny and machismo.
The performances skate on the side of the theatrical, but whilst the soliloquising into the camera tends towards the contrived and the gimmicky, there are few films that can claim to contain such a chemistry set of viscous emotions. And anyway, maybe the overblown theatrics are part of the reason why this is such a gosh darn, thigh-slappingly fun movie, because it does have moments where it’s more live theatre than scrupulously edited footage.
There’s a problem with this film and the problem is this: I, Tonya’s unique selling point is that it’s a self-proclaimed untrustworthy biopic that deals with the problems of objective ‘truth’ and how the media often does to facts what clowns do to party balloons. Yet, the scriptwriter Steven Rogers still chose one version of history and ran with it, and no amount of edgy camera addresses or fourth wall breaks can change the fact that he rather embarrassingly and blind-sidedly tumbled down the same pitfall he was mocking. Don’t get me wrong, there are some excellent parts where key witnesses call bullshit on each other’s testimonies to comedic results, but the movie just doesn’t offer enough alternative versions of events to make it the edgy masterpiece that it thinks it is. It didn’t really have the balls (or ovaries) to follow its conceit to its natural conclusion, and for that reason it must lose marks.
In recent years there have been many excellent (and long overdue) gritty, epic biopics about the female underdogs of the sports world, a few notable mentions being Battle of the Sexes, Million Dollar Baby, Queen of Katwe and the TV series GLOW, and it is a complete breath of fresh air to see the meaty, Shakespearean tragi-comedy I, Tonya join their ranks and give the middle finger to the canon of sports films that has for too long been confined largely to men.
Just as Tonya Harding was scored throughout her professional ice-skating career, it is fitting that I, Tonya be marked likewise, and so … “The judges scores are … 5.7/6.0, 5.4/6.0, 5.0/6.0 and 5.8/6.0!”
