Nominated for Three Oscars including Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress and Best Film Editing

Directed by Craig Gillespie

Though the details have blurred since “the incident,” those of us who were alive in 1994 will never forget the day that Nancy Kerrigan, US Figure Skating Champion, got her knee whacked by an emissary of her arch rival, Tonya Harding. Even after having seen I, Tonya, I can’t remember who won what or beat who when, nor do I particularly care. But the story of the whacking has become a part of American sports lore and most of us can recall some version of it.  At least we can say, “Tonya Harding? Oh yeah. I remember that chick. Wonder what happened to her.”

Well, wonder no more. This film reveals everything you ever wanted to know about Tonya Harding and a few things you’d probably like to forget. And, once again, you can tell by the nomination categories where the strengths of this film lie.

I, Tonya is structured around present day interviews with the key players—Tonya (Margot Robbie), her crazy-assed mother LaVona (Allison Janney), her crazy-assed ex-husband Jeff (Sebastian Stan) and Jeff’s certifiably crazy-assed best friend, turned bodyguard, turned criminal master(minor)mind Shawn (Paul Walter Hauser). These interviews conflict with one another and themselves and send us back in time so that we can see the events unfold for ourselves. Interestingly, they even seep through the action itself as characters regularly break the fourth wall and speak directly into the camera, Ferris Bueller-style, to comment on underlying truths—as they see them, anyway. It lends a lighthearted and even laugh-out-loud air to the proceedings, except when we see Tonya being beaten by Jeff and emotionally abused by LaVona, continually and brutally. Her life is a mess, but she is a fighter and so she pops right back into the fray like Wile E. Coyote, no matter how many anvils land on her head. We have to sort out our own emotions as Tonya keeps putting herself back in abusive situations, refuses to conform to the rules of the society she is trying to break into, never accepts blame for the situations she finds herself in, trusts all the wrong people and has absolutely no one to help her when things get worse than awful—not even her own mother. So many conflicting emotions—for her and us.

The camera work is frenetic and was too much for me in spots—dizzying sometimes. The camera moves a lot, Scorsese-style, in and out of scenes. The skating segments, though, are a testament to the FX team as you can see in this video. Check it out.

http://ew.com/movies/2018/02/01/i-tonya-vfx-video-margot-robbie-tonya-harding/

But the performances themselves are the real attention-getters here. Margo Robbie got a Best Actress nomination for her portrayal of Tonya Harding and she worked for it. This is a very physical role and even though she didn’t do the lion’s share of the skating, she did train for some it and so was able to pull off a rendition of Tonya Harding that carries weight. Robbie’s Tonya is tenacious and trash-mouthed and tough. She is also abused and unloved and broken. Every time we may want to say that Harding got what she deserved, this performance makes us look back and say, “Yes, but…”

And Janney? Fearless. She is at once comical and monstrous, with her fur coat and her parakeet pecking at the side of her head as if she has bird seed in her ear. LaVona is motherhood gone awry, a victim of abuse herself who believes that she is giving her daughter a gift by making her tough. Janney’s steely, chain-smoking LaVona shoves her way through the world, kicking her daughter in the ass in front of her as she goes. It’s a hell of a way to live. It’s hard to go through a whole movie and not feel some sympathy for a character, but if you think you might find a way to develop a touch of fondness for LaVona, Janney will squish it like a bug. She’s fabulous.

I’m not surprised that I, Tonya did not get a best picture nod, for many of the same reasons that Harding herself couldn’t break through to the level she sought. This film is never on its best behavior. It seems to be making fun of itself, sometimes treating its characters more like caricatures than real people, so it’s tough to know how to feel. If these people were just movie characters, if it were a piece of fiction, it would be easier to laugh off the bumbling and the idiocy and the blaming and the pain. But we know that, while filmmakers take liberties with the truth, this is, at its heart, the story of real people who were living real lives of disappointment, desperation, discrimination, uncontrolled anger, abandonment and abuse. It’s hard to take those things lightly.

Oh, and the knee whacking? This movie’s not really about that at all.