I, Tonya, now available on Blu-ray, DVD, and VOD, is a ferociously ambitious film about a ferociously ambitious woman, tackling a truly bizarre bit of recent All-American madness as a rapid-fire black comedy that scorches the earth in its savaging of everything from class to athletics to media to gender. While the film’s frenetic style leads to diminishing returns, a loaded ensemble, led by a blazing, remarkably fearless star turn by Margot Robbie, more than makes up for it.
I, Tonya depicts the stranger than fiction life of Tonya Harding (Robbie) and ‘the incident’ that turned her into a tabloid queen of American trash. A world class, Olympic figure skater, Harding made a name for herself with both her historic athletic ability and her brash, in-your-face personality and style. Harding came from a poor family, pushed into skating at a young age by her mother LaVona (Allison Janey in an Academy Award wining role). Cigarette constantly dangling just before her permanently scowling face, LaVona terrifies the other mothers with her endless stream of abusive language (or flat out abuse), determined to essentially browbeat Tonya into excellence.
It’s no wonder, then, that Tonya would immediately latch on to the first person who offers her an out from that existence. Unfortunately, that person is Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan, wearing a truly astounding mustache), and while Jeff initially comes across as a shy charmer, it’s not long before the abuse starts in this relationship too.
All these threads merge with Tonya’s obsessive quest for Olympic stardom and arrive at ‘The Incident’: the notorious assault on rival skater Nancy Kerrigan, kicking off a frenzy that devastates everyone and everything in its path.
I, Tonya bucks against its biopic shape with a number of narrative devices designed to keep the energy level up and blaze through years’ worth of information in minutes. Key among these are talking head interviews with the major players years after the fact (leading to the remarkable sight of Janney buried in old age make-up telling off the pet bird on her shoulder) and numerous moments of fourth wall-breaking during the narrative proper (i.e., after one episode involving Tonya firing a shotgun at Jeff, Robbie turns to the camera and snarls, “This is bullshit. I never did this.”)
Also prominent are wall-to-wall needle drops, occurring with a frequency that’d make Peter Quill blush. Fleetwood Mac, ZZ Top, Hot Chocolate, Foreigner, Heart, En Vogue, Supertramp, the list goes on.
These devices, and the kinetic work by cinematographer Nicolas Karakatsanis and editor Tatiana S. Riegel, certainly keep the film flying, but as I, Tonya progresses they also begin to get wearying. It starts to seem like director Craig Gillespie and writer Steven Rogers have no faith in their story or their ability to tell it, and so instead they run through a number of tricks they remember from seeing Goodfellas once.
But the thing about Goodfellas (and other Scorsese films) is that the wild, frenetic technique isn’t just there for shits and giggles. Scorsese is surgical in how he uses the camera and how he uses sound, and he knows when to show off with an extravagant feat of cinema and when to back off.
Gillespie does not, and that purposelessness starts to grate as I, Tonya wears on. Most vexing are the talking head interviews, which initially seem like they’re going to be there so we can get multiple points of view on the events of the film, Rashomon-style. But the film doesn’t actually do that, instead showing us Tonya’s take on events at almost all times, even as Gillooly or LaVona contest what she’s saying (the most blatant example: Tonya says Jeff abused her, Jeff denies it. Throughout the film, we see Jeff beat her over and over [and over and over] and this is presented as objective fact).
And that’s not getting into how nonsensical some of the choices are. Why is a film set in the ‘90s filled end-to-end with rock and disco songs from the ‘70s? What is that trying to evoke? Who in the production of this film thought that the best way to put people in the headspace of the early ‘90s, the era of Lisa Frank and the fucking Street Sharks, was to dump Fleetwood goddamn Mac onto the soundtrack? And, lookit, I’m always happy to hear ‘The Chain’ in pretty much any context, but this is the era of Gullah Gullah Island, not Stevie Nicks, you monsters. There appears to have been no thought put into this. No thought, anyway, besides, ‘We heard this in another movie and thought it sounded cool.’
All this sound and fury ends up feeling like window dressing to what ultimately has the standard biopic shortcomings. Life doesn’t function like a movie, and this often results in movies that feel shapeless or have to manufacture phony moments of drama or catharsis that ring false. In the case of I, Tonya, the abuse rained down on her by LaVona and Gillooly is near constant, and at a certain point it starts to feel like Robbie was cast more for her ability to take a punch than anything else.
(As exhausting as all this is, Gillespie and his team are more than capable of putting together scenes that flat out work, full stop. ‘The Incident,’ when it arrives, is a mini-masterpiece of black comedy, cranking up the tension, the humor, and the ‘I can’t believe this happened’ surrealness [totally a word] of recent history.)
What keeps the whole enterprise afloat, and earns the film a recommendation, is the cast, all of whom dig deep into characters who have long been caricatures of trashy tabloid villainy. Janney soaked up all the accolades that Hollywood has to give, and LaVona certainly deserves a spot in the pantheon of terrible showbiz moms, up there with Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford and Rose in Gypsy. Janney snarls her way through the role, making a meal of every “fuck” and “cunt” that Stevens gifts her. It’s a show-y piece of work, and I understand why it received the accolades it did, but ultimately LaVona remains a hateful cartoon, never afforded any real humanity beneath her endless frustrations and cravings.
Robbie and Stan fare much better, both turning in the best work of their careers as a couple who bring out the worst in each other but who can’t extract themselves from the attraction and circumstances that brought them together.
While the film loves to get sidetracked in its bevy of sideshows, this is Robbie’s movie, and she attacks every frame of it like a starving person being introduced to an all-you-can-eat buffet. Robbie’s greatest quality since Wolf of Wall St. has been her unerring willingness to invest herself completely in her roles, not caring either how physically demanding the part or how unlikable the character. She never once apologizes for the worst impulses that drive Harding, but she also never loses sight of the sadness and loneliness at the heart of this woman. Tonya Harding has been a punchline for decades, but Robbie reminds you that a very human heart beats within that chest, and it transforms infamous snapshots from history (like Harding weeping over an untied skate) into genuine heartbreak.
Stan’s got maybe an even trickier role, as there’s little to nothing redemptive about Jeff Gillooly; he’s a small-time nobody who bumbled into a relationship with what turned out to be sitting on a winning lottery ticket. Jeff is a passenger in Tonya’s life, and the imbalance of that sets off his insecurities and eats away at him. His desperation to feel important is what kicks off the whole misbegotten assault, and his need to feel some kind of power in his marriage is what drives the abuse. Jeff is just smart enough to be aware of how dumb he is, and that makes him a dangerous person to be around. Like Robbie, Stan is fearless in how he plumbs some truly despicable depths, and he taps into the pathetic, needy core that drives Jeff.
There are a bunch of other juicy turns peppered throughout the film, including Julianne Nicholson and Bojana Novakovic as skating coaches that try to temper Harding’s worst instincts, and Bobby Cannavale cackling from the margins as a tabloid journalist who is delighted by every insane turn in the scandal.
For my money, best of all the supporting players is Paul Walter Hauser as Shawn Eckhardt, a buddy of Jeff who wrangles a job as Tonya’s ‘bodyguard’ and orchestrates the entire assault on Kerrigan (Kerrigan, by the way, is played by Caitlin Carver and is a sporadic background figure until it’s bashing time. It’s just not her story). Hauser isn’t too-too familiar (he was the Juggalo kid in that one episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia) but he’s a revelation as Eckhardt. I mentioned earlier that Gillooly is an idiot who knows he’s an idiot, well, Eckhardt is free of any such awareness and instead floats through life in an unbreakable bubble of delusion. He goes on and on and on about his background in special ops, his expertise in subterfuge and physical combat, his international network of assassins and criminals, etc. It’s hilarious, but it’s also infuriating, and it gradually becomes genuinely sad as the film progresses.
Of all its qualities, that might be the one that recommends I, Tonya most. For as much as the film presents as a quirky and energetic, for as much fun as it has with all these colorful characters and crazy story, for all that, the film does have a heart to break and it finds sincere tragedy and loss in the fate of Harding. Some folks reacted with hostility to the idea of a movie that presented Harding in any kind of sympathetic light, but while I, Tonya’s own sympathies are more complicated than presenting a binary system of good/bad (except for LaVona. She’s Sauron with a nicotine habit), it certainly does not absolve Harding of her sins. I, Tonya never tries to present its subject as a saint, but only as a human being, a human being capable of and deserving of love, who made mistakes and paid for them and for whom we can have empathy.
That may seem a humble goal, but I, Tonya is battling against decades of embalming cultural awareness. In this, it succeeds with flying colors, and it makes it much easier to forgive any of the shortcomings that might befall an ambitious swing like this.