Other side of the story
“I, Tonya” reclaims Harding’s narrative in provocative film
Screenwriter Steven Rogers was watching a documentary about the disgraced figure skater Tonya Harding not too long ago and thinking about big ideas of class and abuse and the media and truth that were all tied up in her story.
The media at the time, he said, took that bizarre incident which entangled Harding in a conspiracy around the 1994 assault of fellow skater Nancy Kerrigan, and pitted the two against each other. Kerrigan was the princess. Harding was the trash. Even he remembers thinking that Harding had done it for attention.
So he decided to see if her life rights were even available, and called the number for her agent listed on her website. It went to a Motel 6.
“I thought: I am so in,’’ Rogers said.
And with little more than that seed of an idea, Rogers tracked down both Harding and her exhusband Jeff Gillooly and used their wildly contradictory accounts of that moment of infamy, and their lives leading up to it, to develop the screenplay that would become “I, Tonya,’’ a bold re-evaluation of one of the soapiest tabloid scandals of the last century and the most audacious film of the season. It’s playing now in limited release and expanding in the coming weeks.
Australian actress Margot Robbie came aboard not only to star as Harding, from ages 15-44, but produce as well.
“This movie would not have survived the studio system,’’ Robbie said.
There is domestic violence, from both Harding’s mother and ex-husband, tonal shifts, conflicting narratives and no real resolution or answers.
Robbie asked many potential directors how they would handle the violence. Craig Gillespie, the man who got the job, said it had to be brutal.
“It didn’t sit right with me, the idea of covering it up and making it seem not that bad. I felt that would be a great disservice to anyone who’s suffered that before. Also to leave it out completely felt wrong,’’ Robbie said. “But Craig always finds the truth in the situation.’’
Like Harding, “I, Tonya’’ is defiantly itself.
Robbie trained and studied for six months to get Harding down, both in her athletic figure skating style and also her dialect and physicality. The resulting sequences on the ice are a complex but seamless combination of Robbie and two skating doubles. She met her subject later.
The film has become a sort of scrappy underdog of the awards season, and a timely look at a woman who had every odd stacked against her in life and
still managed to become one of the world’s top figure skaters - even though she didn’t look, sound or act like her peers.
“It is going to be interesting to see if this movie changes anything for her,’’ Rogers said. “Film is a powerful medium.’’