I, Tonya

I, TONYA

Director : Craig Gillespie

Year : 2018

Genre : Biographical drama

Rating : ****

Continuing Hollywood's newfound affection for sports biopics, Craig Gillespie's cheekily entitled 'I, Tonya' satirically chronicles the rise and fall of one of ice skatings most reviled figures; the Olympian Tonya Harding who, in 1994, lost her license to skate after being implicated in a horrific assault on fellow sportswoman Nancy Kerrigan. Starring Oscar nominee Margot Robbie in the titular role, 'I, Tonya' mixes jet black comedy with scenes of a genuinely disturbing nature to create a relentlessly thrilling, frequently hilarious and often upsetting portrait of fame, fortune and failure. 

Tracing her life back to her earliest years, Gillespie paints Harding's story as one predominately written in blood. Her own blood. Horribly mistreated by her overbearing mother LaVona (played with delicious malice by Allison Janney) and later her abusive husband Jeff (Marvel alumni Sebastian Stan), Harding's existence is a truly sad one, unable to gain the respect of either her family or the stuck-up skating judges who discriminate her for her working class upbringing. As a result, Tonya grows up to be a deeply resentful and unpredictable person, throwing around profanities and sometimes fists at those who continue to wrong her.

However this temperament belies her incredible skill on the ice over which she reigns supreme, executing complex twists and turns simply unheard of in the sport at the time. Unfortunately, as Harding's fame rises and competition becomes increasingly stiff, Jeff and his goonish best friend Shawn (Paul Walter Hauser) takes matters into their own clumsy hands and what follows is a jaw-dropping reconstruction of what the filmmakers and various characters enigmatically refer to as ''the incident'', an incident that would ultimately justify LaVona's pessimism and predictions of inevitable catastrophe.

Having shined in a number of supporting roles in films such as 'The Wolf of Wall Street', 'Goodbye Christopher Robin' and of course 'Suicide Squad', Margot Robbie now takes centre stage for her debut starring performance and she knocks it out of the park from the offset. Blending comedy with palpable tragedy, Robbie turns the disgraced and widely panned former Olympian into a deeply sympathetic figure,  deftly balancing scenes of unrelenting profanity with moments of heartbreaking intimacy and powerful truths - a much trailed scene involving the silent application of make-up is a true masterclass in facial expression. In contrast, the ice skating scenes are shot with an passion more akin to the adrenaline pumping histrionics of 'Baby Driver' rather than the graceful majesty of Torvill and Dean.

Great too are the rest of the cast with Stan and Hauser both doing great work as the two idiots who would ultimately cost Harding her career. However, it is Allison Janney who steals the show thanks her acerbic (and now Academy Award winning) portrayal of Tonya's irrepressible mother LaVona. Introduced with the unmistakable sounds of Cliff Richard 's Devil Woman, LaVona is a truly formidable figure, a female counterpart to J.K Simmon's chair-throwing Terence Fletcher from 'Whiplash' whose coarse language, reprehensible demeanor and borderline psychotic behaviour makes her one of modern cinemas most intimidating characters. Whether she's smoking her 50th cigarette of the day or casually throwing a knife at her teenage daughters arm, every action LaVona Harding makes seems to be dipped in the most potent of venoms whose effects poison every single person around her and only an actress of Janney's calibre could pull off such a remarkable thespianic feat.

Labelling itself as a movie ''based on irony-free, wildly contradictory totally true interviews'', 'I,Tonya' adopts a faux-documentary style narrative, with each character frequently interrupting the film to correct or question the events that have just taken place. Regularly breaking the fourth wall, Tonya, LaVona and various others speak to us directly, as if having a conversation, rebuking the remarks made by other characters and calling into question the reliability of the movie as a whole. Of course, as fans of 'Alfie' will know, this device has been used in cinema many times before but by not providing us with a reliable narrator, Gillespie (whose previous work includes the 2007 indie hit 'Lars & The Real Girl') and screenwriter Steven Rogers gratefully manages to retain the mystery that continues to revolve around the scandal today. In the end, 'I, Tonya' refuses to take a side and it is this ambivalence towards the extraordinary saga of Harding that makes the film so interesting - forcing us to come to our own conclusions. 

Like a number of the major award contenders this year, 'I, Tonya' is a film that gets better the more I think about it. While it's unorthodox combination of raucous comedy and all-too-real domestic violence makes for a noticeably muddled tone and it's plot may follow the well-trod route of the traditional cinema biopic, 'I, Tonya' is still a terrifically involving movie, brilliantly anchored by Margot Robbie's unhinged and uninhibited central performance which surely heralds the arrival of a new acting heavyweight. Excellently performed by the entirety of the cast, directed with a refreshingly punchy defiance and boasting the best soundtrack since 'Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2', 'I Tonya' is a vigorously entertaining and slyly celebratory ode to one of sports most infamous individuals.