Review of I, Tonya (2017) by Calhern — 10 Dec 2017

Tonya Harding is first abused by her mother, then by her husband, and finally by the figure skating association, the media and all of us. She fights until events get so out of hand that she just can't anymore. That's the film's essence. She rises from poverty and domestic violence to the top of international figure skating in the early nineties, and then, following the infamous attack on Nancy Kerrigan, is banned from skating for life. All the characters get to tell their version of this raucous, insane, highly watchable story until finally Tonya, bleeding on the ground says that "there is no such thing as truth.".

The director, writer, editor and actors set out to accomplish a lot by covering class, sadistic family ties, injustice in high level athletics, media corruption, personal ambition, American costume obsession, and spiritual confusion. Mainly they do at a very high level.

As the story intensifies, so does the always present '70's heavy metal and hard rock soundtrack.

It's a terrific script with carefully thought-out visual details. The camera is smart, always moving, never showy, like early sixties Fellini. Craig Gillespie is a knowledgeable director, with a fine sense of movie history, trying to show the late 20th century collapse of American culture and our total capitulation to mass media through the personal story of Tonya Harding's rise and fall--and further fall. A nice touch to watch for: as the story is winding down, a TV set in the corner announces that the police are looking for football star OJ Simpson in connection with some murders.

The 30x30-like interviews with the principals are great--Harding-Kerrigan became exploitation TV in the nineties--and now, decades later, they each (minus Kerrigan) get to speak their own truth even if the truth is a lie. Or is it? Or does it even matter? To say that Harding and her mother have a love/hate relationship is like saying Whiplash is about a student-teacher relationship. If you look at the trailer, it's a fair representation of the film's style and substance, up to and including Allison Janney's parakeet that she's constantly annoyed by in her in her shocking, unbound and truly great performance. She isn't a helicopter parent, she's a flame thrower parent who never cracks. Actually, nobody in the film does. Ever. Like several other movies I've seen this year, it shows that a lot of very good non-genre film making is coming out of the United States this year.