SKATING ON THIN ICE
How bad girl of the ice rink Tonya Harding came a cropper — thanks to her monstrous mother . . .
JUST in case your appetite for ice-rink drama hasn’t been satisfied by coverage of the Winter Olympics in South Korea, here comes I, Tonya, landing in cinemas with the timing of a perfectly executed triple axel.
The first American woman to perform that fiendishly difficult move was Tonya Harding (Margot Robbie), the subject of Craig Gillespie’s compelling, pitch-black comedy. ‘It was totally the most awesomest thing,’ she tells us, looking back at the most seismic moment of a career cut abruptly short at 23.
But it is not Harding’s ability on the ice that most concerns Gillespie and writer Steven Rogers, so much as her troubled existence off it, which led to a lifetime ban by the U.S. Figure Skating Association.
The ban followed the notorious truncheon attack on Harding’s compatriot and rival Nancy Kerrigan (Caitlin Carver) during the U.S. national championships in Detroit in January 1994, a manifest attempt to stop Kerrigan competing in the forthcoming Winter Olympics in Norway.
Did Harding know beforehand of the assault, which was allegedly planned by her exhusband Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan)? That question has never been satisfactorily answered; the ban was for hindering the prosecution, not for conspiring to nobble a rival.
Whatever, the film unequivocally absolves her. Contentiously, it presents Harding as an even more hapless victim than Kerrigan, whose own trauma as she lay holding her battered knee and wailing ‘ Why? Why? Why?’ — a distressing spectacle that is readily available on YouTube — is all but ignored.
Harding’s victimhood began, at least as I, Tonya sees it, at birth. The film cleverly weaves the drama between documentary-style interviews given to camera by the major players in her story long after the events of 1994.
Some of these are based on actual transcripts, and while Harding herself, quite brilliantly played by Robbie, is the main witness, the most riveting is her monstrous mother, LaVona Golden (Allison Janney).
The pushy parent, driven by a warped notion of tough love is a familiar figure in sporting tales. But LaVona is something different. Tough love doesn’t just need toughness, it also needs love, and there’s scant evidence of that. Perhaps the key line comes early on. Tonya, she tells us, was her ‘fifth child from husband number four’.
Evidently, she didn’t keep having kids to satisfy a maternal instinct — she just couldn’t be bothered to stop.
Moreover, the whiff of the trailer park always accompanied Harding onto the ice. The film makes a great deal of the snobbery of the figureskating establishment, who preferred genteel ballerina types, and were affronted by this working- class athlete more caked in blusher than a street-corner prostitute.
Janney, who won the Bafta for Best Supporting Actress last Sunday, and will probably add an Oscar next month, has suggested that I, Tonya encourages a response a little
like laughing in church, when you’re aware you shouldn’t.
I know what she means. We see Tonya suffering winceinducing physical and psychological abuse not just at the hands of her ghastly mother, but also, later, from Gillooly. Sometimes she gives back as good as she gets.
It’s terrible to watch a young woman becoming so conditioned to expect abusive behaviour from those closest to her, yet this film is also very funny. Somehow, it even extracts laughs from the domestic violence.
In one shocking scene, LaVona throws a knife at Tonya, which sticks in her arm. Even LaVona, it briefly seems, is horrified by what she has done. But she is a stranger to remorse. ‘Oh please,’ she says, after a beat. ‘Show me a family that doesn’t have ups and downs.’ Bizarrely, LaVona talks to camera with an oxygen tube up her nose and a parakeet on her shoulder.
Even more distractingly for a British audience, she looks unnervingly like Coronation Street’s Deirdre Barlow of blessed memory, wearing an expression as if she’s just caught Ken in bed with a pair of barmaids.
That quirk aside, this is a uniquely American story, puncturing the myth that there is no class system over there in the Land of the Free. And aside from the excellence of Janney and Robbie (who is also deservedly nominated for an Academy Award), there is great support, especially from a scene-stealing Paul Walter Hauser as Gillooly’s lumpen friend Shawn Eckhardt, Harding’s hilariously deluded bodyguard, who activated the 1994 attack.
■ ALSO in 1994, another very different figure- skating tale came to a tragic end, with the death from an Aids-related illness of former Olympic champion John Curry. He was only 44.
James Erskine’s fine documentary, The Ice King, offers the timely suggestion that Britain hasn’t given Curry the great credit he deserves for his remarkable achievements on ice, and for being the first man to marry the athleticism of skating with the artistry of dance. Maybe it’s safer, even now, for us to champion Torvill and Dean rather than our first figure-skating gold medallist.
Curry made no secret of his homosexuality, which gained him plenty of adverse publicity, and was outspoken in the Seventies about the rampant corruption in skating.
There is a fascinating clip in this film in which he admits to his trepidation, before every competition, as he waits for the judges to be announced.
‘I just sit there counting EastWest,’ he says, knowing he will never get support from Eastern Bloc judges.
nevertheless, he won individual gold at the 1976 Olympics in Innsbruck, the highlight of a life that was scarred by a great deal of pain.
Like Tonya Harding, Curry had a tormented childhood. His father, who ran a successful engineering firm in Birmingham, flatly refused to let him take ballet lessons and loathed his obvious campness, but would countenance ice-skating because it was ‘ protected by the umbrella of sport’.
They clearly didn’t have much time for one another, yet Curry was traumatised when his father committed suicide. It’s a sad story, but it’s uplifting, all the same, to be reminded of such dazzling talent.