Cheapskate – Margot Robbie as Tonya Harding.
Trying to categorize I Tonya (119 mins, director Craig Gillespie) is rather like attempting to judge the main character of the piece, figure skater Tonya Harding – whose role in the infamous attack on skating rival Nancy Kerrigan prior to the United States naming its team for the Winter Olympics of 1994 brought her worldwide notoriety. The film, which is never less than watchable and for the most part truly engrossing, is part drama-documentary, part biopic, but mostly a bleak (as opposed to black) comedy – while Harding, played with great panache by Margot Robbie, emerges as a compendium of hero, villain and victim, her achievements in the ice rink largely overshadowed by a chaotic and very often harsh upbringing and personal life.
Director Gillespie shapes the plot by using the three main characters, Harding, her mother Lavona (Allison Janney) and (now-ex) husband Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan) by setting them as present day interviewees, each reflecting on key episodes in the story. Naturally their recollections are wonderfully contradictory and presented to serve the purpose of that particular narrator, but Gillespie leaves the viewer in no doubt that Harding was born into a poor, redneck world dominated by her heavy-drinking, chain smoking mother who is prone to appalling outbursts of verbal and physical cruelty towards her daughter. Whether this amounts to abuse or an attempt to instil in Harding the motivation to succeed is for the viewer to decide, but there is something uncomfortable, in every sense, when the young Tonya is not permitted to leave the rink in order to use the bathroom by Lavona, which results in her wetting herself on the ice, the embarrassed look she wears met by a retort of ‘skate wet.’
If her childhood was bleak things in Tonya’s life, away from skating at least, fail to improve into her teenage years, when she meets Gillooly who at first seems an amiable soul only for his violent tendencies to emerge, Tonya receiving little sympathy from her mother as one beating follows another. In competition Tonya also has nastiness and prejudice to deal with, competition judges often down marking her for what they say are failings in presentation, but taken as slights on her cheap costumes and background rather than shortcomings as a skater – talents that can no longer be overlooked when she becomes the first American woman to perform the incredibly complicated, supremely athletic triple axel routine.
In revealing the hardships that occurred on the road to consideration for the Olympic team, the film is far less emphatic on the scandal that prompted her worldwide infamy, namely the January 1994 attack on Kerrigan in a corridor at the Cobo Arena in Detroit. Far from being a carefully planned crime it was poorly conceived and cack-headedly carried out, the director shedding no new light on the incident serving only to fuel speculation on how much Harding knew about the plan, thought-up by her dim-witted husband and carried out by a couple of his equally befuddled cohorts. In his testimony to the FBI Gillooly implicated Harding, whose defence appears to rest on the fact she knew some sort of plan to unnerve Kerrigan in the run-up to the Olympics was afoot, but did not expect it to take the form of a physical assault, her rival being hit by assailant Shane Stant on the thigh with a police baton. In the aftermath Kerrigan recovered sufficiently to take her place in the US team (winning a silver medal at the ensuing games), while Harding became steeped in a scandal that drew colossal media attention.
Depicted today in middle-age, Harding is still surrounded by trailer-trash trappings, smoking heavily and surrounded by a stack of dirty washing up as she argues her case, unrepentant in accepting only nominal blame for the Kerrigan affair and emphatic in the belief that her emergence from the wrong side of the tracks, or rink in this case, was the stumbling block to achieving the success her talent as a skater deserved – the ultimate irony of the Tonya Harding story being she is remembered far more than any of her rivals.
NEIL SAMBROOK is the author of MONTY’S DOUBLE – an outstanding new thriller now available as an Amazon Kindle Book.