Hollywood has two main ways of depicting working-class characters: assullen, silent strugglers, or as loud, laughable vulgarians. CraigGillespie’s “I, Tonya,” which opens tomorrow, takes mainly the secondpath, and that approach, that failure to find an original and personaltone, undercuts and counteracts the movie’s main merit—its empatheticdepiction of Tonya Harding, the Olympic figure skater who, in 1994, wasinvolved in a plot to harm her main rival, Nancy Kerrigan.
The filmmakers are upfront—in title cards—about basing the film oninterviews with the real-life Harding and her ex-husband Jeff Gillooly,and about the differing points of view on the events that the drama willpresent. The film begins, ends, and is punctuated by faux interviewswith the main characters, who discuss their conflicting accounts of whathappened or might have happened and their divergent points of view aboutthose events. Gillespie in effect films the entire action ashypotheticals, in a cinematic conditional mood that’s emphasizedthroughout the film both by the interpolated staged interviews and bycharacters’ asides to the camera, addressing the viewer with winkinginterpretations of the actions in progress.
The drama starts in Tonya’s childhood, in Portland, Oregon, in themid-nineteen-seventies. She’s being raised by her single mother, LaVona(Allison Janney), a fast-talking, smart, lifeworn, and embitteredwaitress, who brings Tonya, who is not quite four years old and hasalready displayed talent and passion for skating, to the local rink forrigorous training, in the hope that she might eventually make the IceCapades. But LaVona’s idea of tough love appears to be tougher than itis loving. In Gillespie’s telling, Tonya (played as an adult by MargotRobbie, who also co-produced the film) was abused by LaVona both as achild and as an adult. But the film shows LaVona beating Tonya with ahairbrush (only once, LaVona chimes in), slapping and pummelling her,verbally berating her (LaVona claims that Tonya skates better angry),preventing the child from leaving the ice to pee. Then, during a fightwith the teen-age Tonya, LaVona is depicted as throwing first a glass ather and then a knife, which pierces her arm.
Meanwhile, Tonya wins prizes in figure-skating competitions and risesthrough the ranks of the field. The unpampered, rugged, rustic Tonyaalso chops wood, fixes cars, and holds tough manual-labor jobs. Herathletic ascension is presented (to the extent that it’s presented atall) as a sort of tunnel-vision monomania, the work of a furiousvirtuosa whose physical strength, athleticism, and skill have no balancein education or experience. (She quit high school in order to devoteherself to skating.) She competes under her mother’s iron grip andbefore her iron gaze, and endures her mother’s fiercely partisan, loud,raucous, and uninhibitedly crude advocacy on her behalf from the stands.LaVona is depicted as becoming both a terror and an embarrassment, andTonya, while still a teen-ager, makes her break, leaving—as the movietells it—the frying pan for the fire.
At fifteen, at her local rink, she meets Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan),who was about eighteen and was there with his best friend, Shawn Eckardt(Paul Walter Hauser). She begins to date Jeff, and Jeff, too, isdepicted in the film as physically abusive: he beats her, repeatedly; hemashes her head against a wall; she takes out a restraining orderagainst him. At the age of eighteen, she marries Jeff, then leaves him,then reconciles with him; he slams a car door on her hand (in the film,Jeff denies doing this); he threatens her, and then himself, with agun—and then shoots her, resulting in a flesh wound to her face.
Gillespie’s flashy camera moves on and off the ice, his slick and rapidediting tricks, and his intercutting of interviews and asides don’tprovide perspective but rather amusem*nt, even diversion, distractingfrom what’s actually a crucial and anguished subject of the movie, theabuse that Tonya endures. But Gillespie plays it for comedy; what heapproaches with some measure of earnestness is the aftermath—Tonya’seffort to conceal a facial bruise before a competition, her complicitywith Jeff in helping him avoid arrest for shooting her.
While becoming a skating star, the first American woman (the moviedwells on this point) to complete a triple axel, Tonya endures yetanother form of abuse, not physical but systemic: the Americanice-skating establishment, in the person of the judges it employs toscore competitions, discriminates against Tonya on the basis of herbackground and her manners, to reinforce the sport’s genteel and, as onejudge says, “wholesome” self-image.
Yet the movie perpetuates the very condescension that it purports tocondemn: it treats Tonya’s background, her tastes, her habits, her wayof talking, as a joke. It may think it’s laughing with her, but Tonya’snot laughing. For that matter, Tonya’s not doing much of anything exceptskating. Halfway through the film, after she delivers unsatisfyingresults at the 1992 Winter Olympics, in Albertville, France (Tonya blamesa broken skate, but the movie, in a rapid, almost flash-frame montage,suggests that she has been partying too hard, eating and drinking toomuch, gaining weight, and getting out of shape), and is preparing for acomeback (at twenty-three) in the 1994 Olympics, in Lillehammer, Norway,the infamous story gets under way, the one that has made the real-lifeHarding notorious.
“I, Tonya” goes into intricate detail regarding the attack on Harding’sprincipal rival, Nancy Kerrigan, who was struck on the knee with a metalrod just before matching up against Harding in a competition in Detroitprior to the Olympics. The movie shows the nature of Tonya’sinvolvement—and noninvolvement. I won’t spoil the twist, but here, too,she is revealed to be the victim of self-serving people close to her.The walls of law enforcement close in on Tonya, and her bewilderment atthe devastating and irreparable consequences of her bad associationsoffers a touch of pathos that most of the movie, depicting horrors, deflects.
Yet the movie shies away from Tonya’s actual identity, temperament,culture, activities, and tastes. Her work as a fork-lift operator and awelder is a tossed-off line of dialogue; her interests are undefined; her ostensible lack of refinement is merely a matter of her loud voiceand salty vocabulary; her relationships are utterly vague, as is herwider network of interactions, of friends and relatives and colleaguesand rivals. Gillespie never sees Tonya as a person but as a character ina drama, reduced to her function in her own story. The movie deliversmore of the culture and mental life of the secondary character of Shawn,the delusional braggart who serves as Tonya’s bodyguard and claims to bean internationally acclaimed counterterrorism expert. Gillespie stageshis empathy for Tonya at arm’s length; he fails to respond to herexperience in a direct, personal way. The result is a film that’s asderisive and dismissive toward Tonya Harding as it shows the world atlarge to have been.
