The Slings and Arrows of Redneck Misfortune
What a terrible joke from on high it must have seemed, that trashy little Tonya Harding was to be a gifted skater. Figure skating, we are told, is a rich girl’s sport where well-bred (or at least aspiring to be well-bred) mothers watch well-heeled daughters dance gracefully on the ice to airs originally composed for ballerinas.
But little Tonya Harding’s mother, played by Allison Janney in what must be, to our knowledge, her greatest performance to date, is neither well-bred nor aspiring to be so. Her general approach to life is embodied in the advice she gives Tonya on how to deal with a bully: “spit in her milk.” And furthermore, little Tonya Harding is poor; the fur coat she wears on ice is stitched together from rabbits killed in the woods by her father (before he up and done gone; the sack o’ shirt).
Thus begins the set up to what surely must be a cosmic joke, the punchline of which will leave little Tonya’s great promise battered and torn by the slings and arrows of redneck misfortune, or rather, a baton colliding with Nancy Kerrigan’s knee.
America is still laughing today.
We enjoyed I, Tonya in the same way we enjoyed The Wild and Wonderful Whites, a documentary about an outlaw family in West Virginia who exist in a vortex of oversized tee-shirts, poor childcare, and “partying.” In that film, we remember watching the Whites fumble around with pills as the matriarch of the family shakes her head (nostalgic of the days when everyone just drank a lot). Tony Harding’s life - screamed at by her mother, accidentally stabbed, beaten by her boyfriend - can be similarly hard to watch. But just as in The Wild and Wonderful Whites, the filmmakers of I, Tonya, aren’t soliciting canned food donations. Their beat is to make the thing giddy, a wild high, like Scorsese ducking and weaving the moral implications of his Wolf of Wall Street, for our viewing pleasure.
This is, as one character tells us “a story populated by boobs.” Director Craig Gillespie treats it as such, deftly punctuating the action with docu-like interviews in which the characters are allowed to tell their frequently delusional side of the story. The result reminds us of an especially dark Christopher Guest movie, but it pays off; we can’t help but laugh as Harding’s mother, older, on oxygen, with a parakeet on her shoulder, cuts in after a scene in which she hits her daughter “one time, I hit her!” When necessary, characters don’t even wait for the film’s editor, Tatiana Riegel, to make her move, instead opting to break the fourth wall themselves, as Tonya does in one scene while husband Jeff Gillooly is literally trying to break a wall with her head.
As you might imagine, the music is fittingly giddy and insouciant, starting with Cliff Richard’s 1976 single “Devil Woman.” And the wardrobe and make up department appears to have taken a certain glee in reducing the beautiful Margot Robbie to trash from the 1980s. Every piece of clothing she wears looks like a hand-me-down someone forgot in the trunk of car when it was wet. Even watching the ice skating, usually a graceful and calming experience to watch, Gillespie make us feel the centrifugal forces at work on Tonya as she executes her dizzying spins, reminiscent of those tearing her apart off the ice too.
I, Tonya is a tragedy told as a comedy. And it works. There isn’t a bad performance or a false note. Robbie takes an impressive turn from glamor girl to hard scrabble brawler. And Paul Walter Hauser gives a hilarious performance as Gillooly’s friend Shawn, an overweight loser who lives with parents, yet claims to work with the CIA.
Still, eventually the irreverent veneer develops a crack or two. This happens during the credits, which feature the real life interviews with Harding et al. upon which writer Steven Rogers and Gillespie have based their narrative. Watching these, we are suddenly seized with the sinking realization that the various boobs of I, Tonya are real people, with real delusions, real abuses, and real stories. Suddenly, we aren’t laughing.