I, Tonya (15)
Whether or not you remember the tabloid furore surrounding former US Olympic figure skater Tonya Harding and her alleged involvement in the kneecapping of sporting rival Nancy Kerrigan, the disgraced 1990s athlete deserves a better film than this grotesque, jokey, dumbed-down treatment of her sad and sordid story.
Nominated for three Oscars, it’s the kind of movie that treats its working class subjects as exotic playthings for its A-list cast, allowing the likes of Margot Robbie, who plays Tonya, and Bafta-winner Allison Janney, cast as her monstrous mother Lavona, to demonstrate their range by revelling in the the vulgar details of Harding’s white trash roots. All rabbit-skin fur coats and nae knickers, it’s a condescending, exploitative piece of awards bait that desperately tries to disguise its lack of insight through mocking self-awareness.
The flippant tone is established with well-worn mock-doc tropes and fourth-wall-breaking commentary from the likes of Robbie’s Tonya and Sebastian Stan, cast here as her abusive ex husband Jeff Gillooly, who went to prison for orchestrating the attack on Kerrigan. Alas, all this really does is make Harding a pop-culture punchline once again – which is just odd given it essentially a story about a woman locked in a cycle of abusive relationships.
The film doesn’t deny that Harding was sometimes her own worst enemy, but it’s not very good at countering this narrative by also capturing how good she was on the ice. And whatever empathy Robbie has for Tonya is frequently undercut by journeyman director Craig Gillespie and PS I Love You screenwriter Steven Rogers, who really don’t have the right artistic temperament for making a sympathetic film about such a vilified woman. Like everyone in the film, they’ve underestimated her with their spell-everything-out approach.