‘I, Tonya’ Review: A comedic peek inside the twisted world of a talented, troubled athlete

To anyone who was a fan of women’s figure skating and happened to live through the bizzarre Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan drama leading up to the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, you’ll probably agree that there was really no other way to portray the events other than the absurdist, farcical way that Craig Gillespie has imagined in the solidly entertaining I, Tonya. Based on Steven Rogers’ screenplay, which was inspired by interviews and completely divergent accounts from its two main protagonists/antagonists (prantagonists?) – Tonya Harding (Margot Robbie) and Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan) – I,Tonya borrows cues from such films as To Die For by simultaneously holding our main characters under an intense microscope as they break the fourth wall (a lot), while also making them sympathetic and engaging at the same time. Its lack of devotion to being “realistic” makes Margot Robbie an inspired choice to play the driven, plain, rough-around-the-edges self-proclaimed redneck Tonya Harding, and she makes the movie by digging deep into a misunderstood woman whose career was tainted by archaic ideals of grace and class, and was destroyed by the same fierce competitive spirit that put her on the world stage.

When I was little, I loved watching women’s figure skating. Growing up, me and my mother knew the names of all the skaters – from Midori Ito, Kristi Yamaguchi, Nancy Kerrigan, and Tonya Harding, among others – and eagerly watched a sport that combined grace and athleticism like no other. While I do remember commentators describing Harding as “athletic” and Nancy Kerrigan as “graceful”, it hadn’t quite registered with me that these were veiled attempts to characterize Harding as the girl who was from the wrong side of the tracks, or the girl that was a touch too masculine and rough to be taken seriously in the world of professional figure skating. Later, French skater Surya Bonaly would earn the same description and for some mysterious reason, also not get the high scores that other more “graceful” or lady-like skaters would garner, robbing her of medals she’d probably rightfully  earned. I stopped watching figure skating after growing too frustrated with the obnoxiously subjective scoring system, and the inherent bias that was all too obvious amongst the skating judges. And one of the things that I loved about I, Tonya is the fact that the film doesn’t shy away from these issues at all, and uses them as part of the reason why Harding should at least get some of our sympathy, even in light of her peripheral involvement in the attempted hobbling of her Olympic teammate, Nancy Kerrigan.

We’re introduced to Tonya as a three year-old (Maizie Smith) being taken to the rink by her salty, spiked coffee-sipping, acid-tongued mother LaVona (Allison Janney, being awesome as usual), who won’t take no for an answer when a skating teacher, Diane Rawlinson (Julianne Nicholson) says she won’t take Tonya as a student because she doesn’t take beginners. Soon enough, though, Tonya is winning her first trophy, and as the years pass, she not only has to deal with having to bear the burden of performing in a sport that demands the money and class that eludes people from her side of town, but she also has to deal with the near constant emotional and physical abuse of LaVona, who misses no opportunity to break her daugher down despite her obvious talent. It’s a piece of the Tonya Harding puzzle that I never knew about, but I’m glad that got included because it provides some pretty key insight as to how she got to where she is.

Later, Tonya meets Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan) as a 15 year-old, and thus begins young love that quickly turns into young abusive love, as Jeff begins to physically beat Tonya on a regular basis… at least in Tonya’s version of events. It should be noted during these dramatized interviews that Jeff denies ever beating Tonya, yet the film shows Tonya’s recollections repeatedly, almost as if to wink to the audience that this actually happened. Just saying that if it didn’t happen, they certainly devoted a lot of film to depicting it.

This, combined with the abuses of Tonya’s mother and the prejudices of an elitist sport, helped to shape a woman who felt she had nowhere to turn, and therefore went to extreme ends to secure herself in the hearts of the public, as well as the Olympic judges. Was it justified? Absolutely not. But it helps to provide an understanding of a woman who has become the villain in a sport that was rigged from the start. The film is very ambiguous about whether or not Tonya was fully in on the eventual plot to physically attack Kerrigan. Even Gillooly will admit that she wasn’t in on it (at least before it happened), and that he was responsible for eventually ruining her career (she was barred from skating for life). So, what we have is not the portrait of a one-dimensional she-devil, but rather a complex woman who is the product of an incredibly rough childhood, and an often unfair professional landscape.

Margot Robbie does an incredible job of humanizing a character that could otherwise be caricatured in a film with this comedic tone. And while someone with her conventional glamour is not the most obvious choice to play Harding, she embodies Tonya with a visceral, imperfect energy that does service to the reluctant figure skating star. She’s rugged and tough one moment, then vulnerable and childlike the next, and all the while portraying it in an organic – and often hilarious – way. Allison Janney, as LaVona, chews the scenery every time she’s up on the screen, and she imbues LaVona with a comedic wretchedness that is both horrifying and darkly riveting. If there’s any character that doesn’t get away with any iota of sympathy, it’s LaVona; and if what the film portrays her as is true, she doesn’t deserve it. I love Allison Janney as an actress, but I utterly despised her character, which should oddly serve as a compliment to what a great job she does here. And – not to be outdone – Sebastian Stan as Gillooly pulls off the impressive hat trick of making you believe he could be the deplorable wife-beater that the film often portrays, or the meek family guy that he claims he is. It’s no easy feat at all, but I came away uncertain of who this person was, despite my doubt that Harding would make up a tale of such pervasive physical abuse.

But despite its often dark subject matter, I, Tonya is a completely entertaining, funny, and disquieting film with a ton of acting, writing, and directing kudos to go around. It’s a rare film that defies studio rules to bring us something wholly original – a film that breaks the rules by telling a story about a woman who broke all the rules in a sport defined by its elitist rules. It’s a tragic hoot that sheds a spotlight on a woman exiled to the dark, and for that alone, you should get thee to a theater pronto.