I, Tonya achieves an almost perfect score; Jessica Chastain skims up in Molly’s Game; Ferdinand will barely keep the kids awake; Italy’s great Tavianis return with Rainbow.

Disgraced Olympic figure skater Tonya Harding receives a surprisingly compassionate portrayal in the Margot Robbie–produced I, Tonya I, TONYA

I, Tonya.

Starring Margot Robbie. Rated 14A

It takes a while to adjust to the 2

notion of Margot Robbie playing disgraced skater Tonya Harding. In the real world, women who look like the former often get treated differently than the latter. Still, this was a passion project for the Aussie actor, who helped produce I, Tonya and gets a lot of things right.

Crucially, Robbie masters the mousy Harding’s crumpled grimace—a mask made of intense chutzpah doing battle with bottomless self-pity. The roots of this general loathing are pretty well-explained by director Craig Gillespie’s scattershot yet giddily satisfying movie— written by Steven Rogers—which turns out to be a darkly raucous satire rather than the true-crime character study you might expect. It ain’t pretty, but it sure is good.

Poverty, abandonment issues, isolation, and, oh yeah, the worst mother in the world have something to do with Tonya’s troubles. In a performance that could find Lady Bird ’s Laurie Metcalfe forced to fight for her supporting-mommy Oscar, Allison Janney provides the biggest laughs as the absurdly named Lavona Golden, a chain-smoking prison guard of a parent who recognizes her daughter’s innate skating talent and absolutely nothing else about the girl. (Young Tonya is played by well-matched Mckenna Grace until Robbie takes over.)

Lavona smacks the kid for the slightest slacking or back talk, until that job is taken over by Tonya’s future husband, Jeff Gillooly (Captain America’s Romanian-born Sebastian Stan). That volatile approach, of course, figures heavily into Tonya’s undoing, with the infamous attack on Olympic rival Nancy Kerrigan (Caitlin Carver, glimpsed briefly here), really another party girl but packaged by the press as the apex of middle-class propriety.

Coming in 1994—same year as the O.J. Simpson and Jonbenét Ramsey crime capers—the assault was largely ascribed to Gillooly’s pal Shawn Eckhardt (Kingdom’s Paul Walter Hauser), who might be described as The Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy if he presented himself as an international counterespionage specialist while still living with his parents.

One curious deficit in the story is the shallow presence of Harding’s main coach (Julianne Nicholson, who played a mom more like Lavona in the nun-centric Novitiate). But if you find the other characters unrealistically cartoonish, stay for the credits and catch the videotaped interviews upon which some scenes are based. They help illuminate the selfserving and plainly contradictory stuff these unreliable witnesses work up for the viewer—sometimes directly, as when Janney turns to the camera and says, “What’s happening to my story line? What. The. Fuck.” Exactly.

> KEN EISNER

MOLLY’S GAME

Jessica Chastain is a perfect 2

match for Aaron Sorkin, the West Wing–ian master of rapid-fire overlapping dialogue, here making his directorial debut after more than two decades of writing and producing major projects for other people.

On the surface, it’s easy to see why he would want to tell the fact-based tale of a woman sharp enough to run her own high-stakes poker games in Los Angeles and New York. How high? Let’s just say that guys (always guys) like Ben Affleck and Leonardo Dicaprio would pay 250K a pop just to sit at the green-felt table, with beautiful waitresses handing them free Rémy. The real-life Molly Bloom, played here by Chastain, wrote a book about her years in the bigs, changing most of the names. But that wasn’t enough to keep the FBI (back when they weren’t liberal commies like they are now) off her tail for “raking” money for her games—the part that makes them illegal—and for covering for Russian mobsters (back before they became good guys). Consequently, the film is divided into several time frames, covering her upward climb in

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the world of poker, and her attempts to stave off the feds, via high-priced lawyer Charlie Jaffey (Idris Elba, going Yank again); he’s intrigued by her case, despite the fact that all her money has been frozen. There’s also a back story about her youthful rise as an Olympic ski hopeful, pushed forth and emotionally hindered by a stage father (Kevin Costner) who doesn’t know when to quit, even when injuries say otherwise. (In that regard, Molly’s Game is like an upper-class version of I, Tonya, coincidentally opening this week.)

What ties together all these time codes and settings (mostly Ontario, despite what’s said) is the most relentless voice-over narration since Goodfellas, which it also resembles thematically. Like that Scorsese gangland tale, it doesn’t really say that much about society, preferring to dwell in the nether reaches of smoke-filled rooms where the powerful make their own rules and crack wise. Hollywood sharkiness is represented by Michael Cera, of all people, whom she calls Player X; he enjoys winning mostly “for the pleasure of destroying other people’s lives”.

The good news is that most of that narration, and the dialogue, is pretty crackling stuff. Still, at 140 minutes, this Game feels padded out with side issues about drugs, depositions, and Daddy. (There’s a bookending face-off with Costner that feels more contractually obligated than organic.) At the same time, Molly has no friends, lovers, or other interests, so all we know for sure is that she’s one hell of a hostess. But does she have the mostest? > KEN EISNER

RAINBOW: A PRIVATE AFFAIR Starring Luca Marinelli. In Italian, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable

Vittorio and Paolo Taviani, 2

born in 1929 and ’31, respectively, directed international hits like Padre Padrone and Good Morning, Babylon. They also grew up in Mussolini’s Italy and reached their teen years as it came to a violent end. In their latest effort, Rainbow: A Private Affair—coming to the Vancity Theatre courtesy of the Vancouver Italian Film Festival—they return to the themes of Night of the Shooting Stars, their 1982 meditation on the fluidity and chaos that happens when war is almost over.

Although credited to Paolo as sole director, Rainbow was written by the brothers, adapting an autobiographical novel by Beppe Fenoglio, who died in 1963, soon after writing it. Like Fenoglio, the protagonist here is a former English-lit major who joins the partisans when Germany occupies his country.

Nicknamed Milton, after the author of Paradise Lost, he’s played by lanky Luca Marinelli in a far cry from his role as a psychopathic gangster in They Call Me Jeeg. Milton can kill if he has to, and his ragtag comrades are frequently engaged by the black-shirted Italian Fascists they call “roaches”. But when we meet him, in the fogenshrouded Piedmont area, he’s utterly preoccupied by memories of the paradise he shared before the war with a local debutante named Fulvia (Valentina Bellè).

A chance encounter with her nowshuttered family mansion makes him recall their mutual love of Wuthering Heights and Judy Garland’s version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”, giving rise to the film’s unwieldy and somewhat misleading English title. While Milton certainly does feel nostalgia for his faded Oz—which existed only about a year earlier, in fact—and is now a private in a nameless army, the matter really bugging him is the thought that Fulvia may have dallied a bit more deeply with his self-assured pal Giorgio (Lorenzo Richelmy, star of Netflix’s Marco Polo), now a fellow partisan.

When he goes looking for his friend, he discovers that Giorgio has just been captured by Fascists, and we don’t know if he wants to rescue the guy or just find out for sure what happened in their summertime triangle. This tone of existential rumination dominates the tale, making for a somewhat stagey drama in which everyone seems to know each other and all take turns see page 26