Movie Review: Margot Robbie Skates to Glory (and Skirts Blame) in "I, Tonya"

Oscar nominee Margot Robbie deserves plenty of credit for I, Tonya, even if the film allows its infamous title character to skirt blame.

Public pariah, disgraced Olympian and convicted criminal Tonya Harding is getting a new trial in the court of public opinion. It only took 24 years.

In 1994, the figure-skating Harding found herself banned for life from the sport she loved, due to her involvement in an attack on her U.S. teammate Nancy Kerrigan ahead of that year’s Winter Olympics.

How much she knew about the assault has always been in dispute, due to contradictory reports from Harding, her ex-husband Jeff Gillooly, and the cadre of inept, not-quite-hitmen they engaged.

She still took the brunt of it. While both Harding and Kerrigan later competed at the Olympics, they did so amid a media circus, with America—and much of the world—enraptured by the salacious details. Harding became a punchline, and, as seen in the ESPN documentary The Price of Gold, she dug her heels in, even more convinced she was the ultimate victim in all of this. Innocent or not, that’s a stretch.

It’s okay if you’ve never heard of the tale before now. Margot Robbie, the incandescent and newly minted-standalone star who makes Harding likeable here, only learnt of it when screenwriter Steven Rogers sent her the script. The Australian star produces, while Aussie Craig Gillespie directs, adding an outsider’s perspective to the States’ affinity for vilifying one-time heroes. The irony: this thing was written by someone who shares a name with Captain America.

Gillespie brings stylistic verve to Rogers’ script, which fuses re-enactment with mockumentary, allowing Robbie’s Harding to speak directly to camera, sometimes during the action. Sebastian Stan, as the reedy Gillooly, and Allison Janney, as Harding’s cruel mother LaVona, also get to break the fourth wall and share their sides of the story, disputing one another’s accounts in real-time. The comparisons to Goodfellas are apt, though you’d be better off name-checking David O. Russell’s American Hustle or Martin Scorsese’s own Goodfellas tribute, The Wolf of Wall Street (which introduced the world to Robbie). I, Tonya is very much a third-generation take on Goodfellas, and about a third as good.

Gillespie abandons the documentary aesthetic during the re-enactments, setting his cinematic tracking shots and montages to a soundtrack of ‘70s classics. The skating sequences are lively and thrilling, despite some dodgy face-replacement CGI. The picture is overall cartoonish and broad, which means it’s highly entertaining and often quite funny, though that makes all the scenes of domestic abuse especially discomfiting. However, I, Tonya is not quite the trenchant satire it aspires to be. The social commentary is limited to lines of dialogue like, "America… you know?"

We catch flashes of O.J. Simpson on a news report towards the end, bringing American Crime Story to mind, though that miniseries was far better at examining the rot at the centre of the United States’ Venn diagram of celebrity and criminality. And if that TV show sometimes forgot about its victim, it at least didn’t try and incriminate her. Though I, Tonya aims to demonstrate the liquid nature of truth, and poke holes in the players' alibis, it basically believes Harding’s version of events—allowing her to criticise Kerrigan for her handling of the aftermath. Kerrigan gets no right of reply.

Rogers and Gillespie might argue they’re giving Harding enough rope to hang herself in the eyes of the audience; except, Robbie is so charming and sympathetic, it feels more like complete absolution. Gillooly too, for all his violent actions, is weirdly aww-shucksed into forgiveness as well. He did it for love!

It’s true that Tonya Harding was, in many ways, a victim; she was raised in poverty, and was allegedly tormented violently by both her mother and her husband for the first few decades of her life. But I, Tonya ultimately becomes a movie about shirking responsibility, with Harding blaming everyone else for the consequences of "the incident", including the audience for laughing along, in an admittedly chilling moment that lands solely due to Robbie’s steely performance.

Janney—an Oscar lock in a category that, historically, belongs to bad mothers—is similarly excellent, deploying a wicked death-stare as the unrepentantly awful matriarch. She's a big character, who’s not only critical of her disappointing daughter and her deadbeat husband, but of the filmmakers too, literally complaining when it appears her plotline is beginning to disappear.

Those kinds of touches set I, Tonya apart as a goofy and unreal farce, rather than something to take seriously. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, maybe that’s the fate this tragedy deserves: Tonya Harding wishes she wasn’t a punchline, and yet her big-screen redemption plays like a big joke.

3.5/5

In Australian cinemas 25 January. Rated MA15+ for strong coarse language and sex scene.

Photo: Neon