I, Tonya
Composite Score: 85.97
Starring: Margot Robbie, Sebastian Stan, Allison Janney, Julianne Nicholson, Paul Walter Hauser, Bobby Cannavale, Bojana Novakovic, Caitlin Carver, Maizie Smith, and McKenna Grace
Director: Craig Gillespie
Writer: Steven Rogers
Genres: Biography, Comedy, Drama, Sport
MPAA Rating: R for pervasive language, violence, and some sexual content/nudity
Box Office: $53.94 million worldwide
Why should you Watch This Film?
I, Tonya is the 2017 dark comedy mockumentary about Tonya Harding’s life and figure skating career that stars Margot Robbie as the titular skater, joined by Allison Janney as her mother LaVona Golden and Sebastian Stan as her ex-husband Jeff Gillooly. The film presents the story as a retelling by Harding and her ex-husband in a duo of interviews in the modern day, with a combination of flashback and fourth wall breaking used to portray the “actual” story and some cut-aways to an interview with her mother and to an evidence tape of an interview with Tonya’s bodyguard Shawn Eckardt. The film was a hit with critics and audiences, being celebrated for its performances, comedy, and emotion, also earning three Oscar nominations – Best Editing, Best Lead Actress (Robbie), and a win for Best Supporting Actress (Janney).
Why shouldn’t you Watch This Film?
I, Tonya is a film that trumpets from the start its nature as a film with a slew of unreliable narrators, but it’s still possible to get caught up in the drama and style of it all and take this to be the definitive version of the events of Tonya’s life and the circumstances surrounding the assault on Nancy Kerrigan. It’s still a dramatized film, based on conflicting interviews with Harding and Gillooly by screenwriter Steven Rogers, so it’s important to keep that in mind when watching it. To me, the point of the film isn’t so much to tell Tonya Harding’s story – because the media did plenty of that when everything went down. Rather, it seeks to show the impact of the media’s treatment of celebrities, particularly women and tell a story about cycles of violence, generational trauma, and family drama. There are some moments where it does this better than others, but by the end, I even found myself buying Tonya’s version of events without question, and I don’t know that that was always the filmmakers’ intent. It’s a really awesome and creatively crafted biopic, but it’s also one that can easily draw you into the more fictionalized elements without you immediately taking notice.
So wait, why should you Watch This Film?
In addition to its more universal message about the ways that media shapes harmful and problematic narratives around celebrities and the ways that our dysfunctions can be passed on to our children if we aren’t intentional about caring for them, I, Tonya also benefits from four fantastic central performances that take the whole film up a notch. Sebastian Stan gives arguably the best performance of his career as the hapless, lovestruck, and abusive version of Gillooly that the film gives us. He portrays every aspect of the character in a way that makes sense of every bit of the situation between him and Tonya – giving the character just the right blend of charm, violence, sleaze, and ineptitude to be a tragically unsympathetic conspirator and participant in the mess of life depicted in the film. Paul Walter Hauser, though, is the scene-stealer of a supporting character on the men’s side (as he often is), playing the delusionally dangerous Shawn Eckardt with just the right amount of unnerving deadpan delivery to be both comic and believable – it’s seriously a crazy performance that deserved more love than it got. Obviously, Margot Robbie is phenomenal as Tonya Harding, and the fact that her hair and makeup department didn’t get the recognition they deserved from awards bodies for getting her to look even marginally like Harding is a snub that needs to be investigated. Seriously, though, her take on the villainized figure skater presents her as close to reality as possible, bringing emotion to every skate, rationality to every decision, and empathy to her tragedy that finally comes all the way through in her accusations of the audience at the end of the film, driving its message home and her performance to amazing heights. It’s one of those tragically unawarded performances because of how great Frances McDormand was that year in Three Billboards, and in hindsight (in the aftermath of whatever the heck 2020 and Nomadland were), I think she might pull the win in a revote. Finally, Allison Janney’s portrayal of Harding’s hard and abusive mother LaVona has to be up there as one of the most deserving wins of that award in this century. The way that she delivers consistently despicable statements with such sincerity makes her an easily loathsome villain, but she somehow keeps it so incredibly authentic in the midst of the film’s darkly comedic nature, never feeling overdone. It feels like the culmination of every judgmental comment ever made by every mother rolled into a single performance, and for that it maintains a humanity that’s hard to shake, and she fully earns her accolades.
Bolstered by a message that goes beyond the negative effects of sex, drugs, and rock and roll and by a leading cast that collectively give some of the best performances of their careers, I, Tonya is elevated above the typical biopic fare to be a film that fully deserves a place among the Greatest Films of All Time. It bears mentioning that it’s a film whose depictions have to be taken with a grain of salt, and it even reminds audiences to do so at the very beginning, but the combination of entertainment, emotion, and information that it brings to the table merits watching and revisiting time and time again. Currently, this film is available to stream on Max if you’d like to give it a go in the near future.
