Going into the movie I, Tonya, my overall knowledge of the Tonya Harding Nancy Kerrigan story was limited at best. I remembered it kind of like the OJ Simpson wrongful accusation of double-homicide (#hedidn'tdoit#hahaI'mjokingofcoursehedid), as in it was an event that happened when i was like 6 or 7, and adults talked about it a lot. From there all my understanding of the story came from a Weird Al Yankovic song called "Headline News," a parody of Mmm Mmm Mmm" by the Crash Test Dummies. Sing accordingly in your head:
Once there was this girl who
Swore that one day she would be
A figure skating Champion
And when she finally made it
She found some other girl who was better
And so she hired some guy
To club her in the kneecap
Full Disclosure: I still listen to this song. I love it. But so what I'm trying to illustrate here is other than the barest bones of it, I knew very little about the actual Tonya Harding story. So I was a blank canvas when I sat down to watch too-crazy-to-be-true-true-story-sort-of-not-true-based-on-who-you-ask-sort-of-biopic I, Tonya, which chronicles not only the famous "Incident" but Tonya's whole life, including growing up with an abusive mother and then an abusive husband and going to the Olympics twice by the age of twenty-three. And what resulted is a movie that, much like its protagonist, is kind of a mess but still a lot of fun and great at what it's trying to accomplish.
The movie starts off by saying it is based on wildly contradictory accounts from the stories principal players, Tonya Harding and her high school mustache-turned-husband Jeff Gillooly, accompanied by talking heads of the two describing their own memories of the events some time after the events. The movie splashes meta elements of narration throughout as well, like Tonya's manager speaking directly to the camera to confirm, "Tonya really did this," during her intense training montage, to Tonya shooting a shotgun, cocking it, and looking directly at us to state, "This never fucking happened." For a story as absolutely ridiculous as this with so many idiotic main characters running around, it makes perfect sense for it to take on this unreliable narrative point of view. At the end Tonya even says, "There is no truth," to kind of belabor the point home, and for the most part it works. But at times the movie wants to have its meta cake and eat it too. If you insist on not insisting things happened a certain way, you can't also expect the audiences to feel the empathy you want us to for the characters. Instead every character other than Tonya (and often times including Tonya) come off as blithering idiots and completely unlikable, almost to the point of exhaustion.
The movie has pacing problems toward the third act, focusing far too much of its time not only on the "Incident" but the fucking idiots who supposedly perpetrated it. Honestly, the whole movie could have ended before the entire knee-bashing and I would have been fine with it, because the story they created around Tonya and her mother and (at times) shithead Jeff was definitely compelling enough. Margot Robbie totally kills the entire flick, and once they stopped focusing on her as much the movie lost some of its steam and didn't pick back up until she started skating again.
Part of the reason for that is because Jeff Gillooly (The Winter Soldier's Sebastian Stan, who is appropriately a fucking asshole but still seems slightly miscast) is such an unlikable presence in the movie that after the nineteenth time he beats the shit out of Tonya, it's really not as funny as I think the movie hopes it is. The movie is extremely raunchy and dark and severe, and most of the time it works, but there are scenes where the violence happening on screen does not match up with the comedic tone the movie is trying to represent.
But overall these are small complaints for a movie that overall I enjoyed very much. As previously stated, Margot Robbie is fantastic as the titular Tonya, giving her a wonderful mixture of pathos and fecklessness. She had an extremely hard childhood, no is denying that, but as an adult it's rendered her incapable of ever accepting responsibility for anything that goes wrong in her life. She sells the mixture wonderfully and the movie is endlessly entertaining because of it. Allison Janney is unflinchingly monstrous in her portrayal as Vonya, her overbearing and abusive mother. She makes each insult and each slap sting for the audiences while still being fascinating to watch. Most of the writing (especially for these two characters) is sharp and incisive and paints a complex portrait of family and raising a daughter.
As someone who never really cared much about figure skating before (read: at all) I went home and youtubed forty-five minutes worth of Tonya Harding doing triple axles. It was badass. Regardless of some of the smudging of facts, I really felt the movie did try and give us its most truthful version of, well, not necessarily the facts, but what truly mattered most to understanding Tonya Harding as more than just "that bitch who bashed her opponent's knee in." It's crude, and raunchy, and even at times messy, but so was Tonya. And that's pretty cool.
Grade: 5.4, 5.5, 5.3, 5.4, 5.4, 5.5 (Are those accurate skating scores? Maybe!)
Random Thought: I wish they had included more real-life footage during the movie instead of just during the credits sequence. Actually seeing Tonya Harding do the triple axle was way more impressive than the weird CGI-face-plastered-on versions they gave us during the movie. They make it look appropriately impossible during the movie, yes, but seeing her really do it is fucking insane. Did you guys know how insane triple axles are? I had no idea. I think I'm gonna go watch some more Tonya Harding skating videos. Chick had SASS.
Oh, and here is a link to the that Awesome Weird Al song I mentioned. Tonya and Nancy are the second verse. ENJOY.
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