Craig Gillespie (2017)

The high point of Tonya Harding’s figure-skating career came in 1991, when she became the first American woman to land a triple axel in competition, winning the US Championships in the process, then a silver medal at the World Championships.  Harding’s sporting achievements were completely and forever eclipsed by an off-rink incident in January 1994, when her ex-husband Jeff Gillooly orchestrated a physical attack on her big rival Nancy Kerrigan at the US Championships, just a few weeks before the Lillehammer Winter Olympics.  Kerrigan wasn’t badly hurt and was able to compete in Lillehammer, where she won silver and Harding finished eighth.  After the Games, Harding pleaded guilty to hindering the criminal investigation into the incident and was banned for life from the US Figure Skating Association.  She’s had subsequent short-lived careers in music, movies, wrestling, boxing and television.  In 2010, she ‘set a new land speed record for a vintage gas coupe … driving a 1931 Ford Model A, named Lickity-Split, on the Bonneville Salt Flats’ (Wikipedia).   She married her third husband the same year and gave birth to a son in 2011.  In recent years, she’s had jobs as a welder and hardware sales clerk.  She now lives in Washington State, north of her hometown of Portland Oregon.  Tonya Harding is, to put it simply, a notorious figure in American popular culture.  The title of Craig Gillespie’s new film about her life, as well as evoking respectable literary forerunners (I, Claudius, I, Robot), has the ring of in-her-own-words-putting-the-record-straight.  This is misleading.  I, Tonya is hard to define but it’s certainly not that.

Gillespie and the scenarist Steven Rogers use a mockumentary framework, interspersing the biographical action with talking-heads interviews featuring Tonya (Margot Robbie), Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan), Tonya’s mother LaVona (Allison Janney), Jeff’s pal and henchman Shawn Eckhardt (Paul Walter Hauser), Tonya’s coach Diane Rawlinson (Julianne Nicholson) and a television producer (Bobby Cannavale).  A legend at the start announces that what follows is ‘based on irony-free, wildly contradictory, totally true interviews with Tonya Harding and Jeff Gillooly’; the tone of those words is some hint of what’s to come.   The film implicates its audience.  As well as speaking to camera in the interview sequences, the main characters occasionally break the fourth wall in other scenes.  Tonya, in interview, can be confrontational:  at one point, she glares at the camera and tells us she knows we’ve bought a ticket for the movie only because of ‘the incident’.  (Even if I didn’t buy as many cinema tickets as I do, this wouldn’t hit home:  I don’t think the Harding-Kerrigan scandal is part of sporting folk memory this side of the Atlantic.  Brits old enough to remember the Lillehammer Olympics will know they were preoccupied with Torvill and Dean’s comeback there.)  Tonya comes from the wrong side of the tracks and I, Tonya makes much of the skating establishment’s snobbish prejudice against her, from the very start of her competitive career.  But foregrounding this prejudice and warning us voyeurs that we’re watching only out of schadenfreude is a subterfuge on the filmmakers’ part.  Their treatment of the error-prone redneck characters exudes what-are-they-like derision.

With one important exception, the performances are effective.  Although Margot Robbie’s much more beautiful than the real thing, she and some clever make-up combine to give the heroine a rough, raw look that’s a good enough substitute for the real Tonya’s unpretty face.   Robbie gives a sympathetic, even empathetic, performance though she never seems inside Tonya’s head.  That may be intentional:  a more richly believable portrait would likely have made the physical violence inflicted on Tonya by both her husband and her mother even harder to stomach.  Robbie’s forceful, rather shallow portrait sits more easily with the brutal slapstick.  As Jeff, Sebastian Stan is a different problem (and the important exception).  His low-key playing is at odds with the style of I, Tonya.  The footage of the actual Jeff over the closing credits suggests that Stan’s inadequacy isn’t even the result of literal faithfulness:  the real-life Jeff has a slimy plausibility that Stan lacks – and which would have set up a sharper contrast between Jeff and his morbidly obese, cack-handed, delusional sidekick Shawn, well played by Paul Walter Hauser.   Bobby Cannavale’s caricature of the cynical TV man is amusing, though the role is minor.  Julianne Nicholson is fine as the somewhat precious coach, though I didn’t understand why Diane Rawlinson, having parted company once with Tonya, came back for more.

Which leaves Allison Janney as mother-from-hell LaVona.  She starts her daughter skating at four years old (Maizie Smith and Mckenna Grace play the younger Tonya at different ages); when the child wants the toilet, LaVona tells her it’s not time for that yet, a yellow puddle forms on the rink and LaVona says, ‘So skate wet’.  In the course of the film, LaVona, inter alia, kicks her daughter off a chair, lands a kitchen knife in her upper arm, and sits impatiently at Tonya and Jeff’s wedding reception without taking her coat off.  LaVona needs her coat in another key scene: after the ‘incident’, she visits Tonya, professing unusual respect and admiration but concealing a recording device supplied by the press in the hope that LaVona can extract a confession from her daughter.  Allison Janney has been one of my favourite character actresses for approaching two decades.  I should be more pleased than I am that she’s sweeping the Best Supporting Actress board for this performance.  It’s precise, witty and grimly amusing – especially in LaVona’s brisk self-justifications and remarks to the pet parrot perched on her shoulder in the present-day faux interview.   Craig Gillespie also exploits Janney’s unusual height to convey LaVona’s towering monstrosity.  (I don’t know if the real-life LaVona was similarly tall:  there’s only a brief shot of her seated at the end of the film.)  Yet in spite of all this, Janney’s brilliant turn hits few notes (compared anyway with Lesley Manville in Phantom Thread  and Laurie Metcalf in Lady Bird).  This and her physical appearance help to reinforce the cartoon quality of I, Tonya but Janney’s credibility makes the film’s contempt for its characters more offensive.

Like Margot Robbie and Allison Janney, the editor Tatiana S Riegel is Oscar-nominated and deserves to be:  the cutting between Robbie on the ice and the double executing the jumps and spins is seamless.  If you end up wanting to think well of I, Tonya you can probably admire it as a formally inventive biopic.  If you don’t you’ll realise the distinctive title is nothing more than attention-getting and that breaking of the fourth wall is designed just to give a few scenes a bit of extra pep.  I found I, Tonya very uncomfortable to watch – and not as a result of what Tonya says to make the audience uncomfortable.  When Craig Gillespie and Steven Rogers put those words about ‘the incident’ in her mouth, they may be tongue in cheek but you get a stronger impression of their smirks.  The on-screen legends at the end tell us that Tonya now not only is happily married but also wants it to be known that she’s a good mother.   What a gift for Gillespie if Tonya Harding really did ask for this to be made clear.   What a pleasing irony – and final joke at her expense.

26 February 2018