I, Tonya (2017)

 

Genre: Drama/sport            Time: 2 hours        Director: Craig Gillespie

Quick Summary: Tonya Harding, a competitive ice skater, rises to fame despite her personal struggles. However, her career begins to go off the rails when her ex-husband re-enters her life.

Now, to start with, this is actually based on a real-life event that happened. In 1994, Nancy Kerrigan, a dear friend of Tonya Harding, was attacked after practice at the Cobo Arena in Detroit, Michigan, in what would become one of the biggest sports scandals in history. The hitman was Shane Stant, who used a 21-inch collapsible baton to strike Kerrigan's right leg. Tonya Harding was unfortunately bundled up in this scandal and this film explores the events leading up to and after it.

It starts off as a documentary with little interviews, constantly flicking between people such as Tonya herself, her ex-husband, and Tonya's mother; all with little flicks of dark comedy. 

Tonya Harding (Margot Robbie) is a very tough and vulnerable figure skater. Her lower middle-class origins set her apart from her competitors who are more traditional in their private lives as well as in their performances on the ice. She is constantly put down by the judges who give her low scores just because they do not like how she is and that she refuses to fit in with the rest.

The skating scenes in this are wonderful and mesmerizing to watch, and they're actually extremely accurate to Tonya's original numbers on the ice, even down to the costumes. The amount of attention to detail in this film is amazing! Margot Robbie does a brilliant job of capturing Tonya's energy and attitude. Also by never losing touch with the vulnerability and surprisingly resonant humanity beneath the fiery figure skater, she is able to keep the humor of the ridiculousness of Harding’s story ever visible without losing its melancholy.

The narrators fill us in on the sad and sordid details of this gifted skater's life, including her unloving mother's physical, mental, and emotional abuse of her daughter; her ex-husband Jeff’s many beatings of her; and the bizarre actions of her body-guard Shawn.

The film will constantly flick between these interviews and small scenes of events, which honestly is quite refreshing to me. The normal scenes are captured wonderfully, the camerawork isn't really something to comment on, but the setups are really nice. And the acting is really well done in this! From what I could tell, they are very much spot-on with real-life people. Everyone is memorable, and nobody falls under the rug.

It manages to balance itself between dark comedy and showing how truly tragic Tonya's life was. The movie wallows in depicting its film as a he-said, she-said. Throughout the picture, the now very divorced couple will alternate in narrating scenes, with one occasionally breaking the fourth wall in the other’s version of events by dismissing them while staring dead into the camera.

There is something I did like later on about the camera work, as paranoia hit Tony's Ex-husband, the shots get more frantic and rush about after people, trying to capture how crazy the whole situation was. How trapped he felt as he tried to get away, and struggled to stay away from Tonya.

Even though this film is long, you get so invested in the story it doesn't matter. It is very enjoyable and very interesting to see how much this famous figure skater's life fell in such little time.

10/10

• "There’s no such thing as truth … Everyone has their own truth"

• "America, you know – they want someone to love, but they want someone to hate."

• “Nancy gets hit one time and the whole world sh**s. For me, it was an all-the-time occurrence.”