Review: I, Tonya

I, Tonya (15)

USA 2017 120 mins Dir: Craig Gillespie  Cast: Margot Robbie, Allison Janney, Sebastian Stan, Paul Walter Hauser, Julianne Nicholson, Caitlin Carver

A hilarious, rule-flouting biopic with a brace of outstanding, justly Oscar nominated female performances, Craig Gillespie’s reworking of the Tonya Harding story as broad comedy risks offending liberal hand-wringers with its literally knockabout approach to domestic abuse. It would have worked perfectly as the uplifting true-life tale of a talented, dirt-poor girl from the wrong side of the tracks taking on the snooty figure skating establishment. But then along comes “the incident”, as everyone refers to it, and the film veers off into the kind of bozo true crime territory where one might expect to find the Coen brothers sniggering quietly to themselves.

From the outset, Gillespie hits us with a welter of unreliable narrators in a riotously entertaining but never needlessly convoluted barrage of mockumentary interviews and flashbacks, even getting all meta on our asses with frequent fourth-wall breaking (“This is bullshit. I never did this!” objects Tonya of a scene in which she takes pot-shots at her idiot hubby). As a little girl, all Tonya wants to do is skate, and her scowling, chain-smoking waitress monster mom LaVona (Janney, sporting a look seemingly modelled on Tootsie, had Dustin Hoffman’s character gone to seed in a backwater of Portland, Oregon) will stop at nothing to push her out on the rink with the rich brats. Trouble is, no matter how good a skater she is, ‘Trashy Tonya’ will never fit in. A self-confessed redneck with a cheap perm, potty mouth, blue fingernails and home-made costumes who skates to heavy metal, she becomes the first American woman to pull off something called the ‘triple axel’ (an awful lot of spinning around in mid-air, basically), but is continually marked down by judges on grounds of ‘presentation’ – which is establishment code for being the wrong sort. They’d prefer the nation to be represented by a wholesome middle-class girl with a presentable nuclear family, like Nancy Kerrigan (Carver).

Along the way, our heroine meets dim-witted, charmless Jeff Gillooly (Stan) – chat-up line: “Do you like food?” – and falls fast. He inherits Tonya-beating duties from LaVona, who refers to him dismissively as ‘moustache’, and their volatile relationship charts a steady path towards “the incident”, facilitated by Jeff’s even-more-stupid fat boy buddy Shawn (Hauser) – a conspiracy theorist and fantasist who lives at home with his parents.

There’s a lot of career-best work here. Margot Robbie, who’s languished in some awful shite of late (Suicide Squad, anybody?) could easily have presented Tonya as a caricature, but contributes a revelatory performance that refuses to sand down any of those rough edges and has us rooting for her without laughing at her. It’s been a while since talented Allison Janney (y’know – Juno’s mum) has been given such a peach of a role and she excels as the world’s most toxic parent, whose words of maternal encouragement and support include “You skated like a graceless bull-dyke!” and “You fuck dumb. You don’t marry dumb.”

Director Craig Gillespie is best known for the over-praised pseudo-indie pap of Lars and the Real Girl. More recently, he brought competent anonymity to the direction of Disney heroism flick The Finest Hours. Here he attempts something far more ambitious and succeeds magnificently in keeping all the balls in the air in a film that doesn’t seek to pretend that there is an objective truth, takes sly digs at the tabloid TV for which Tonya’s tale was so much catnip, and revels in its riskily rambunctious subversion of a well-worn genre. The classic rock soundtrack is spot-on too. Although these events took place in the ’90s, most of the songs (Bad Company, Foreigner, ZZ Top, Fleetwood Mac, Heart, etc) are drawn from the ’70s and ’80s, and are frequently deployed in amusing counterpoint to the scenes they accompany, from Tonya and Jeff’s violent courtship (Dire Straits’ Romeo and Juliet) to their bust-up (Supertramp’s Goodbye Stranger).