Retelling the myth of Tonya Harding

By N.E.G.

THE story of Tonya Harding’s rise and fall is sporting legend. One of the top female figure skaters in America, her career and her reputation was destroyed when she was implicated in a plot to assault her rival, Nancy Kerrigan, shortly before the 1994 Winter Olympics. The attack—a police baton to the knee after a training session—was orchestrated by her ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly, and his friend Shawn Eckhardt, but Ms Harding admitted to having full knowledge of the scheme. Some suggested that she may have even been the mastermind of it.

So few people who set out to see “I, Tonya” will begin with a sympathetic view of its subject. Even fewer will leave the film with that view unchanged, or at least muddled. The thrilling and unsettling biopic from Craig Gillespie seeks to reclaim the legacy of a woman whose story, it argues, was written in error. It depicts her not as an aggressor, but as a lifelong victim—of domestic violence; of mocking by her peers and by the skating community for her humble origins; and of the press, who convicted her in the public eye for a crime she may have had nothing to do with. It is a morally ambiguous film about the pervasiveness of abuse and the collective rush to judgment.

That abuse starts at home with her mother, LaVona (Allison Janney). A young Harding (Margot Robbie) is subjected to attacks both physical and emotional, and often in public. In one blackly comic sequence, LaVona accidentally stabs her daughter with a steak knife. Yet Ms Janney portrays a slippery character. In some scenes, her bulldog attitude seems almost admirable, and there is a certain catharsis in hearing a string of emphatic obscenities. And when LaVona’s ferocity is pointed in the right direction, it serves to help her daughter. Harding is below the minimum age requirement but keen to learn to skate, so LaVona intimidates the instructor into taking on a younger pupil.

The cruelness Ms Harding endures is fodder for both pain and humour, and the film-makers manage to skillfully navigate the pitfalls of this traumatic subject matter. After surviving the insults of her mother, Ms Harding marries Gillooly (Sebastian Stan), her high-school sweetheart. Not long after the nuptials, he begins to beat her, and Mr Gillespie films these scenes with a rough energy. His camera chases them around the house, capturing every bruise and broken bone: it is domestic violence shot, problematically, like a prize-fight.

The skating community is only marginally more charitable to her. A world-class talent by her teen years, Harding’s scores are kept down by judges who prefer poised princesses and classical music to Harding’s inelegant Southern rock routine. She rages against the insult of her scores—the outbursts hardly help her case—but the film sees them as a justifiable, human reaction to the injustice.

But while the film seeks to demythologise Ms Harding’s life, it also rejects objectivity. The narrative is framed with direct-to-camera testimony from the characters of Harding, LaVona, and Gillooly, whose accounts heavily contradict each other. On occasion, Mr Gillespie splits the screen so that two characters speak almost at once: we are never told which is telling the truth. He even permits the characters to comment on the action while it’s unfolding. Tonya, pointing a shotgun at her husband, turns to the camera and tells the viewer: “I never did this.” With no way of fact-checking the claims, the viewer has to go along with the ride.

Yet all the while shirking narrative cohesion, “I, Tonya” still seeks to convince us that Ms Harding was largely ignorant of the plan to injure Ms Kerrigan. Harding agrees to send her intimidating letters before the National Championships to throw her off her game (after having received death threats herself, which she is convinced came from Kerrigan), but Gillooly and Eckhardt (Paul Walter Hauser) upgrade the plan to an assault. Harding just wants to skate, and when she is convicted of obstructing justice in the case and banned from professional skating for life, Ms Robbie’s tears convey a grand injustice.

It is an audacious attempt to manipulate the viewer, and one that could easily fall flat. But the film-makers pull it off, largely thanks to the compelling performance of Ms Robbie, who grounds the film in an emotional reality while the film undertakes its tricks. Portraying Ms Harding from her teen years to her final disgrace, Ms Robbie paints a portrait of both power and vulnerability, finding complexity in a character that is perpetually simplified and marginalised by even her loved ones. “I, Tonya” replaces an old myth with a lively and topical one. It is a triple axel of a film that, miraculously, sticks the landing.