Geeks logo

Movie Review: 'I, Tonya'

Robbie and Janney deliver award caliber performances in Tonya Harding bio.

By Sean PatrickPublished 6 years ago 6 min read
1

It’s hard to pin down director Craig Gillespie. On one hand, he directed the wonderfully warm and quirky Lars and the Real Girl in 2007 but also directed the awful, unfunny "comedy" Mr. Woodcock that same year. Gillespie has since directed the remarkably dull sports flick Million Dollar Arm, the forgettable and unnecessary horror remake Fright Night and the wildly underrated and too quickly forgotten The Finest Hours. So, is Gillespie a great director or a hack? Is he an auteur or a Hollywood carpenter, cobbling together studio products?

Gillespie’s latest effort, the sports-bio-pic, I, Tonya doesn’t necessarily answer these questions. On the one hand, the film is quite entertaining with a rock star lead performance by Margot Robbie and an Academy Award level supporting performance by Allison Janney. On the other hand, the editing is often muddled as to who is recalling what portion of the story via the faux-documentary structure of the film and the tone is rather dissonant, inviting laughs one moment while asking to be taken seriously in others, especially those related to domestic violence.

I, Tonya tells the story of the life of the infamous figure skater Tonya Harding (Robbie). Tonya grew up with an abusive mother, Lavona (Janney) and a mostly absent father who taught Tonya how to hunt deer with precision and then ran away so as not to be destroyed by Tonya’s mother. As awful and abusive as Lavona Harding was, she instilled a toughness in her daughter that would become her hallmark as she rose through the ranks of American Figure Skating.

Tonya was thrown into the remarkably competitive and cutthroat world of competitive figure skating at just three years old, according to this story anyway. By the time she was five years old, Tonya had won her first competition against girls much older than her and by her teen years she was in high level competitions with the goal of making it to the Olympics. All the while Tonya faced down her abusive mother and a stuffy, unwelcoming figure skating world that seemed to have no place for someone as outlandish as Tonya, preferring the demure, classical music style competitors over Tonya’s less cultured, rock n’roll, power, and strength style.

On more than one occasion coming up a teenage Tonya would directly confront skating judges over how her technique was stronger than other girls but she was given lesser scores. It wasn’t until Tonya was able to perform the vaunted triple axel, a move only ever performed by male figure skaters before Tonya came along, that figure skating elite were forced to take the uncouth Oregon teenager seriously as an Olympic level athlete.

This struggle might have defined Tonya’s life and set her on a path to keep proving people wrong about her if she didn’t repeatedly get in her own way. Tonya’s poor choices stemmed mostly from her taste for weak men, a reminder of her father. Enter Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan), a spineless twerp with a bad mustache and a frantic temper. Jeff entered Tonya’s life at a very young age and a time when she was desperate to escape the abuse of her mother.

Gillooly was the proverbial "only port in a storm" and Tonya decided to marry him for his devotion and as an escape from her family. It was a bad choice that would haunt her for years to come. Gillooly was foolish and abusive and when he tried to "help" her career, that’s when Tonya’s life took a turn for tabloid infamy. In the film, everyone calls it "The Incident" and what an incident it was. The attack on Tonya’s rival, Nancy Kerrigan, prior to the 1994 Olympics became one of the definitive scandals of the new tabloid era, and one that has resonated through the decades since.

"The Incident" began when Tonya received a death threat that she assumed came from one of her competitors as a ploy to mess with her head before a big competition. Tonya mentions offhand that she thinks it was Kerrigan, a former friend who had become increasingly distant and competitive. Gillooly and his friend, Tonya’s sort of "bodyguard," Sean Eckhardt decide that they will get back at Kerrigan with a threat of their own.

With Tonya’s approval, they planned to send letters to Kerrigan threatening her life while she practiced for the Olympic trials. However, they don’t want the letters traced back to them and subsequently to Tonya, so Jeff paid $1,000 to have a pair of Sean’s friends, people he claimed were fellow intelligence professionals, though neither he nor they were remotely intelligent let alone professional, to send the letters from Nancy’s hometown in Massachusetts.

The plan went south quickly with Sean asking for more money after his friends went to the wrong state to try and find Nancy. Then, despite Gillooly and Tonya calling off the plot, Eckhardt changed the plan and had his friend physically assault Kerrigan, breaking her knee with a club. It took only days for the police to catch up with the assailant who gave up Eckhardt who gave up Jeff and Tonya. In days it was a sensation with some believing that Tonya herself had organized the whole thing.

'The Incident" is something reminiscent of a Coen Brothers movie plot with characters seemingly ripped from Raising Arizona in their broad, often hilarious, stupidity. During the presentation of "The Incident," I, Tonya becomes the movie Gillespie intended to make, a dark comedy about a bigger than life occurrence that fascinated the entire world. This, unfortunately, is also where we find the cracks in the films foundation: the sloppy editing and character perspectives that shift seemingly without notice.

I, Tonya employs a messy, faux documentary structure that has the actors portraying their characters in 2017 and recalling the incidents of the story from more than 20 years later. This is not a bad structure but it required a greater attention to detail than what is given here. Director Gillespie claimed in an interview with Deadline.com that he intended the flashbacks to be messy and the perspective to be murky in order to force the audience to pay full attention. Well, I paid attention and still found it rather hard to tell who was telling the story from one scene to the next.

And then there is the film’s dark sense of humor. At times the comedy of I, Tonya really lands, especially Janney’s biting ugliness in Lavona’s interview segments. At other times though, the film is very serious as when the story is forced to come to terms with the abuse Tonya suffered. There seems to be no question that Tonya was abused by both her mother and her husband and the film shows that but also shows Tonya fighting back, at many points showing Tonya as openly cruel and dismissive toward Jeff. I don’t care how rude Tonya Harding might have been, there is no excuse to be made for the things Jeff Gillooly is alleged to have done and the film skirts that a little too closely. Too often I was left wondering if scenes involving abuse were intended as funny or not and that is an uncanny valley that no film should occupy.

I do love the performances in I, Tonya however and that is enough for me to recommend it. I have my reservations about the movie but Margot Robbie and Allison Janney are far too good for me to question whether I should recommend I, Tonya. The film is in limited release now in some major markets and will go into wide theatrical release on December 8.

review
1

About the Creator

Sean Patrick

Hello, my name is Sean Patrick He/Him, and I am a film critic and podcast host for the I Hate Critics Movie Review Podcast I am a voting member of the Critics Choice Association, the group behind the annual Critics Choice Awards.

Reader insights

Be the first to share your insights about this piece.

How does it work?

Add your insights

Comments

There are no comments for this story

Be the first to respond and start the conversation.

Sign in to comment

    Find us on social media

    Miscellaneous links

    • Explore
    • Contact
    • Privacy Policy
    • Terms of Use
    • Support

    © 2024 Creatd, Inc. All Rights Reserved.