2018 Film Review: I, Tonya (2017)

Directed by: Craig Gillespie
Written by: Steven Rogers
Starring: Margot Robbie, Sebastian Stan, Allison Janney
IMDb Link

I, Tonya is a unique look at the life of Tonya Harding, based intentionally upon conflicting and subjective accounts.

*

The film carries over Tonya's (Robbie) entire skating career, all the way up until the incident that she remains known for. We also see her abusive relationships with her mother LaVona (Janney) and first husband Jeff (Stan), and how they shaped an unfortunate amount of her life.

All throughout the film, the acting is top-notch. Robbie shows incredible range, expressing real suffering as she struggles to handle the pressure of everything that hangs over her while driving herself to achieve greatness. Tonya goes through a lot in this movie, and Robbie rises to show every bit of the complex emotions involved. Janney is also fantastic, disturbingly at ease as a mother that is abusive but with conviction; you don't sympathise with her, in fact Janney makes it very easy to hate her, and more often than not she's there to entertain with shock, but Janney's performance also brings a sense of understanding to her actions that cannot be understated. Stan brings an excellent contrasting performance to the table; his character is much quieter and far less outwardly shocking, so his performance isn't as visibly outstanding, but it creates a strong dissonance with his abusive background behaviour, which ends up pulling off the role very well.

The writing and tone in the film are a strange but also effective mix. The story goes to great lengths to humanise Tonya, but also to stress that the story is being told by a several unreliable narrators. The film has everyone say their piece, but also clearly takes sides in painting Tonya entirely as a victim of LaVona and Jeff, so other accounts in the story become seemingly worthless in the actual telling of the story and only end up serving as punchlines. This becomes further conflicting as the film takes on discussions of subjectivity and frames the story in slightly bizarre ways. The film will often have Tonya narrating over a part of the story, only to have the Tonya in the story finish the narrating Tonya's sentence. She'll even in-story interject in to other people's stories. It's as if the film wants to bring up the idea of the subjectivity of truth to ease the presentation of a piece of history in an alternative way, but it then dashes that subjectivity in order to reinforce that the filmmakers believe their particular account. It works sometimes, and largely due to both the fact that the film never loses track of this theme and reminds the audience of how unreliable its narrators can be, but these points of execution are too on the nose and a little at odds with themselves.   

The Short Version: With stellar performances from Robbie and Janney, I, Tonya is an entertaining and humanising re-examination of the Tonya Harding story. The writing is on the nose and the film takes strange liberties with tone and framing as it attempts to get across the subjective nature of truth couched within its story, but the film is ambitious in doing that, it never stops the acting from shining through.

Rating: 7.5/10

Published January 29th, 2018