Butler's Cinema Scene

Margot Robbie as Tonya Harding

“I, TONYA” My rating: A-

120 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Everybody knows that spunky figure skater Tonya Harding was behind the plot to smash the knee of  her teammate and strongest competitor, Nancy Kerrigan. Right?

Well, maybe not. The astounding “I, Tonya” suggests that Harding  may not deserve her rap as the poster girl for unsportsmanlike conduct.

“Based on irony free, widely contradictory, totally true interviews” with the major participants (under the closing credits we see some of the actual news and police interview footage), this savage and breathtakingly entertaining black comedy from Craig Gillespie (“Lars and the Real Girl”) is also a powerful dramatic and emotional experience, one that forces a total reassessment of the Harding/Kerrigan affair.

By the time it’s over you don’t know whether to laugh or weep.

Along the way it gives Aussie glamor girl Margot Robbie the opportunity to display world-class acting chops as Tonya, while cementing Allison Janney’s reputation as the cinema’s greatest bad mother (we’re talking a perf that leaves “Mommie Dearest” in the dust).

Steven Rogers’ screenplay (a huge step up from his usual stuff…”Hope Floats,” “Stepmom,” “Love the Coopers”) centers on a series of recreated interviews with the main characters, illustrating their memories with flashbacks.

The tone is set early on with Janney’s appearance as LaVona, the stage mother from hell. She’s like a human skull beneath a Beatles wig with an ever-smoldering cigarillo. In the present-day interview scenes she always has a parakeet on her shoulder.

LaVona is a foul-mouthed waitress and (mostly) single mother who motivated her little athlete with psychological and occasional physical abuse. (“She skated better when enraged.”) She practically crows at the memory of  Tonya wading out onto the rink for the first time and blowing away the privileged little girls who had been at it for years. (“Those bitches didn’t know what hit them.”)

Allison Janney

Class warfare runs deep in “I, Tonya.”  The rest of the skating community regards Tonya and LaVona as white trash.  The judges deduct points for “presentation”…they’re repelled by Tonya’s homemade outfits, her swearing and smoking and her unapologetically redneck attitude. The only way to get the credit she deserves is to do something no other female skater has ever achieved…to execute two triple axel jumps in the same competition.

Recalling her childhood, the grown Tonya rolls her eyes at the abuse she absorbed: “Nancy gets hit one time and the whole world shits.”

Small wonder that as a teen Tonya couldn’t wait to get out from under LaVona’s smothering influence, practically throwing herself at local dufus Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan).  Their courtship gets off on the wrong foot…they’re accompanied on their first date by LaVona, who asks “You two fuck yet?”

Paul Walter Hauser, Sebastian Stan

Tonya and Jeff wed young. Why the marriage goes bad depends upon whose story you believe.  Tonya claims that as her fame grew Jeff became more physically abusive. He swears he never hit her, but admits his guilt in instigating the attack on Kerrigan.

“My name was a verb,” he ruefully recalls. “If you bash someone in the kneecap you ‘Gillooly’ them.”

The attack on Kerrigan, the film maintains, was instigated by Gillooly under the influence of his fat, creepy blowhard of a friend, Shawn Eckardt (Paul Walter Hauser), who asserts that he is Tonya’s bodyguard and claims to have experience with undercover ops. Mostly he has experience gorging on fast food. Eckart hires a couple of buffoonishly incompetent gangsta wannabes to do the dirty deed.

“I, Tonya” (the title appears to be a reference to “I, Claudius,” the novel and classic PBS series about about a stuttering Roman emperor mistakenly written off  as an idiot) works on so many levels it’s head-swimming.  Simply as a recreation of the ’80s and ’90s it’s a dead-on marvel, replete with bad fashions and cheesy pop to which Tonya likes to choreograph her routines.

The skating moments are scarily convincing, as is the overall aura of backstage intrigue at major competitions.

At the center of it all is Robbie’s performance, which captures Harding from just about every angle.  By the time it’s over — the post-skating Harding tried to earn money by participating in all-woman boxing events — we’re totally in her corner.

Whether she did it or didn’t is beside the point.

| Robert W. Butler