‘I, TONYA’ SHARP AS A FIGURE SKATING BLADE
With the title’s tongue-in- cheek allusion to “I, Claudius” (another epic tale of madness and debauchery), the dramatic comedy “I, Tonya” revisits — with verve, intelligence, scathing humor and more than a touch of sadness — the bizarre 1994 attack on figure skater Nancy Kerrigan by goons associated with the camp of Kerrigan’s athletic rival, Tonya Harding.
If dredging up that subject all these years later seems tabloid-worthy, and little else, you also should know that the movie is a meditation on the elusiveness of truth. And it’s a portrait of America at the dawn of the 24-hour news cycle, the coming epidemic of not-my-fault-ism and our fixation with fame-for-fame’s-sake.
“I, Tonya” is funny when it wants to be, poignant when it needs to be and surprisingly effective in harnessing these deeper themes to a character who might otherwise be dismissed as a lightweight laughingstock. “Generally people either love Tonya or are not big fans,” says the skater’s first coach (played by Julianne Nicholson), in a voice- over that signals the filmmakers’ intention to paint Harding as a national icon, for better or worse.
Directed by Craig Gillespie from a screenplay by Steve Rogers, “I, Tonya” is based on what we are told (via on- screen titles) were “irony-free, wildly contradictory, totally true” interviews that Rogers conducted with Harding and her ex-husband Jeff Gillooly. The couple are masterfully played here by Margot Robbie and Sebastian Stan.
The film begins with 4-year- old Tonya’s arrival on the ice, pushed there by her stage-mother-from-hell, LaVona Golden ( Allison Janney), puffing on More cigarettes and swearing like a longshoreman. From that point, Gillespie tracks Tonya’s slippery path from the skater’s abusive childhood to her downfall while still in her 20s.
Robbie’s performance is a marvel of a disappearing act, with the Australian actress transforming herself beneath a veneer of toughgirl makeup, crunchy hair spray and the Oregon-born skater’s Pacific Northwest accent. But the role is more than an impersonation, and Robbie finds — and shows us — the broken pieces of Tonya’s damaged soul, with a kind of fierce vulnerability that makes her sympathetic and at times heartbreaking.
Present- day reminiscences by these two characters frame the film, which plays out as a series of flashbacks where Robbie occasionally breaks character to directly address the camera. The supporting cast is impeccable, most notably Bobby Cannavale as a TV producer from the tabloid news show “Hard Copy,” and Paul Walter Hauser as Gillooly’s imbecilic co- conspirator Shawn Eckhardt.
But it is Janney who steals every scene she’s in as LaVona, a harridan who at one point throws a paring knife into her daughter’s arm. In another scene, she bribes a spectator at one of Tonya’s competitions to heckle the young athlete, believing that her daughter will skate better if she is under pressure.
In an extreme example of this psychological torture, a very young Tonya is forced to urinate on the ice after her mother won’t let her take a bathroom break. “Skate wet,” LaVona tells her, coldly.
But the film softens such bouts of cruelty with an abiding sense of humane, if absurdist, comedy, smoothing out the tonal shifts that may have you gasping in horror one minute and laughing the next.
Most intriguingly, Kerrigan (Caitlin Carver) appears hardly at all in the film. “I, Tonya” suggests that, in some ways, it’s Tonya who is the victim. At the same time, it doesn’t offer any excuses or pull its punches. The film makes clear Tonya Harding is no angel, but also reminds us of her grit, determination and accomplishments: The skater was the first woman to execute a triple axel, in 1991.
“I, Tonya” also argues that America’s real sweetheart is not Kerrigan, but this little hellion, who first takes the ice to the tune of Cliff Richard’s “Devil Woman.”