ALSO ON THE BIG SCREEN
If you’re of a certain age you may remember the images of a crying figure skater beamed across the world in January 1994. Olympian sweetheart Nancy Kerrigan had been hobbled in an attack orchestrated by the ex-husband of her fellow teammate and rival Tonya Harding. The world was fascinated and the story became a modern-day fairytale with an evil stepsister and a tearful Cinderella at its heart.
Director Craig Gillespie takes us back to Harding’s life before the scandal that made her name famous and turned her ex-husband Jeff Gillooly into a verb for vicious sneak attacks. Scriptwriter Steven Rogers takes an ingenious approach to the material, turning it into a darkly comic but still empathetic mockumentary portrait of a woman raised dirt poor by a cruel, tough mother and pushed to achieve figure-skating greatness in spite of her desperate upbringing, abusive husband and the snobbery of the sport’s establishment.
In this the film aligns itself with black comedy mockumentaries such as Gus Van Sant’s To Die For and the behind-the-scenes beauty pageant farce Drop Dead Gorgeous.
While it’s easy to mock Harding and Gillooly’s self-preserving white trash to-camera confessions, as the story progresses it becomes a darker and more sensitive look at the tragedy lurking in the shadows of the bumbling buffoonery of Gillooly’s attack.
Played with a keen sense of humanity by an excellent Margot Robbie, Harding is a complicated figure who is more than the evil bitch she was painted as by the tabloids at the time. She’s superbly supported by Alison Janney in the role of LaVona Golden, an alcoholic selfhating figure with little to recommend her as a mother. Captain America’s Sebastian Stan provides plenty of insecure masculinity to laugh and cry at as Gillooly and he’s ably accompanied by his friend Shawn (Paul Walter Hauser) creating a duo of stupidity straight out of a silent comedy.
With Oscar nominations for Robbie and Janney, I Tonya is a refreshingly subversive and darkly funny critique of tabloid sensationalism and an examination of the lengths to which those without will go to achieve their American dreams.