Tonya’s truth still on thin ice
Starring: Margot Robbie, Sebastian Stan, Alison Janney, Paul Walter Hauser, Bobby Cannavale. If seeing is disbelieving, then they only have lies for you.
THE truth is not permitted to get in the way of a good story in I, Tonya.
To be fair, the filmmakers had no say in the matter.
With so many different versions of what really went down during the flamboyantly bizarre cavalcade of events chronicled here, you just have to let the lies have their way.
Though you are sure to be deceived by I, Tonya, you are also certain to be entertained. Perhaps even enlightened.
First, let’s backtrack to a place where the facts remain irrefutable.
On January 6, 1994, someone walked up to leading US figure skater Nancy Kerrigan and struck her above the knee with a metal baton.
The attack was later found to be perpetrated by a man hired by the husband of Kerrigan’s chief rival on the US Olympic squad, Tonya Harding.
After that, the minutiae of the case remains murky, almost despite the FBI investigation that followed.
Therefore I, Tonya screenwriter Steven Rogers and director Craig Gillespie quite wisely ignore the impossible task of isolating the most authentic version of the story. There never will be one. Remarkably, instead of hampering the movie’s chances of charming and challenging an audience, it turbocharges them.
The big, fat lies just keep on coming, and never outstay their welcome.
Which is perfectly acceptable, as not one of those implicated in this trashy debacle — the mercurial Miss Harding (played with a magnetic energy as damaged as it is damaging by Margot Robbie), her obsessive spouse Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan) and their idiotic chief bodyguard Shawn Eckhardt (Paul Walter Hauser) — can agree on any single sliver of truth anyway.
With so many unreliable narrators in play, the only figure capable of administering a dose of reality here is Harding’s leatherlunged, acid-tongued mother, LaVona (an incredible display from Alison Janney, a sure thing for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar).