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FINDING YOUR FEET (12A) I, TONYA (15)
GREAT figure skaters make the most complex moves look effortless.
And that’s precisely what Margot Robbie achieves in this black comedy about disgraced US skater Tonya Harding.
This true story hurtles along like a Coen Brothers comedy, forcing us to have sympathy with this devil in sequins.
She’s far from innocent but she’s not the instigator of the 1994 kneecapping of her skating rival Nancy Kerrigan.
The main villains of the piece are her viperish mother LaVona (a Bafta-winning Allison Janney), her moronic ex-husband Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan), and her deluded bodyguard Shawn Eckhardt (Paul Walter Hauser).
Harding’s reputation and career are obliterated in a perfect storm of resentment, stomach-churning violence and total idiocy. The prologue claims this account is based on “irony-free” interviews with the main players.
As the older versions of LaVona, Gillooly, Eckhart and Harding narrate their mostly unreliable accounts, director Craig Gillespie scrambles the timeline to show the rise and fall of an unconventional skating star.
In an early scene, LaVona throws a knife at her teenage daughter that lodges in the girl’s arm. The foul-mouthed, utterly unrepentant LaVona is a monster but a very compelling one.
When we haven’t seen her for a while, she pops up to complain: “Well, my storyline is disappearing now.” We almost feel sorry for her.
Gillespie also uses flashbacks to undermine some of the narrators’ more colourful claims,
In one interview Eckhart, the main architect of what Harding calls “the incident”, describes himself as an “expert on international counterespionage”.
Later, we learn he lives in his mother’s basement and we hear him ask her for permission to make a phone call. “It’s local!” he shouts up the stairs.
But mostly this is Robbie’s show as she shines on the ice but is even more impressive off it. The worse she behaved, the more I found myself rooting for her. This is a difficult balancing act but Robbie barely breaks a sweat. DARK RIVER (15) IF Emmerdale was taken over by the writers of EastEnders, it might look something like Dark River.
In this grim British drama, sibling rivalry and a dark family secret threatens to destroy a dilapidated North Yorkshire sheep farm.
Ruth Wilson is Alice, a young farmer who returns to the family she left 15 years earlier.
Her father (Sean Bean) has died and Alice wants to take over the tenancy, much to the annoyance of her brother Joe (Mark Stanley) who can’t forgive her for walking out.
The performances are excellent and the film is beautifully shot. But this gloomy drama is as predictable as the Yorkshire weather. NEXT WEEK: Red Sparrow. THE WEEK AFTER: Walk Like A Panther.