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2017 OSCAR-NOMINATED LIVE ACTION SHORTS

February 8, 2018 by butlerscinemascene

2017 OSCAR-NOMINATED LIVE ACTION SHORTS  Overall rating: A- 

“DEKALB ELEMENTARY” (USA, 20 minutes)  B+

It’s a torn-from-the-headlines concept that could have been exploitative.  Instead Reed Van Dyk’s “DeKalb Elementary” his all the right humane notes.

The office of an elementary school is invaded by a young man (Bo Mitchell) with an assault rifle.

“This is for real,” he tells the office lady (Cassandra Rice) behind the counter. “We’re all going to die today.”

The next 19 or so real-time minutes are both hair-raising and wrenching. The shooter takes a few potshots at the police who have converged on the school, but mostly he’s freaking out. He says he’s a mental patient with nothing to live for.

The desk lady immediately gets to work proving him wrong, calling him “Sweetie,” dispensing maternal comfort and carrying on a telephone conversation with the cops.

Tensely paced and powered by two wonderfully subtle performances, “DeKalb Elementary” will stick with you.

“THE SILENT CHILD”  (UK, 20 minutes) A-

Chris Overton’s “The Silent Child” is like “The Miracle Worker” condensed to 20 insightful minutes.

Libby (an astounding Maisey Sly) is an adorable 6-year-old living with her parents and teen siblings in England’s rural midlands. But she’s deaf, and over time she’s figured out how to use that to pretty much get whatever she wants.

Overworked and time strapped, her parents hire a therapist, Joanne (Rachel Shenton, who also wrote the screenplay), to spend days in the home, preparing Libby for public school.  The girl quickly picks up the basics of sign language; not unexpectedly, she bonds with Joanne, the only other person with whom she can fully communicate.

But their relationship spawns new problems. Libby’s mother Sue (Rachel Fielding) and other family members are too busy to learn signing; rather than make that effort they want  to emphasize lip reading as Libby’s main communication skill. And then there’s old-fashioned jealousy, as it dawns on Sue that she’s losing her daughter to another woman.

“The Silent Child” is in a sense propagandistic. Shelton is an advocate for the hearing impaired, and the film is intended to educate and change minds.

But that cannot diminish its effectiveness as drama.   This is a quiet heartbreaker.

“MY NEPHEW EMMETT’   (USA, 20minutes) A

One of the most shocking and horrific episodes of the Jim Crow era comes wrenchingly to live in Kevin Wilson, Jr.’s “My Nephew Emmett.”

The subject, of course, is the torture murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till, a Chicagoan visiting relatives in Mississippi in 1955 when he reportedly whistled at a white woman.

The focus here is less on young Emmett (Joshua Wright), who is seen only fleetingly at the beginning and end of the film, than on  his uncle, Mose Wright (L.B. Williams), a preacher who learns too late of his nephews unthinking transgression, and spends a soul-shaking night standing guard with a shotgun, awaiting the redneck posse that will surely come for the boy.

The film has been impeccably mounted and perfectly acted. Special kudos to Jasmine Guy (yes, the “A Different World” star) as the preacher’s wife and Dane Rhodes as the profane and intimidating leader of the lynching party.

Prepare to be shaken.

“THE ELEVEN O’CLOCK”  (Australia, 13 minutes) B

Derin Seale and Josh Lawson’s “The Eleven O’Clock” plays like a classic Monty Python sketch, an absurd situation fueled by delightful wordplay.

Here’s the setup:  An 11 a.m. appointment in a shrink’s office.  The doctor’s new patient is a megalomaniac who believes himself to be a psychiatrist.

The problem facing the viewer: We don’t know which of these two pomposities (played by Lawson and Damon Harrison) is the mental patient, and which the M.D.  Both insist they are the psychiatrist. This leads to spectacularly gnarly exchanges like this one:

“I don’t think it’s healthy for a doctor to pretend to be a patient for a patient who thinks he’s a doctor. Wouldn’t you agree?

“I would…except you’re not a doctor talking to a patient. You’re my patient who thinks he’s a doctor talking to a patient who thinks he’s a doctor indulging the illusions of a patient who thinks he’s a doctor.  Is that clear?”

Perfectly.“WATU WROTE / ALL OF US” (Germany, 22 minutes) A-

The brotherhood of man gets a brief but intense examination in Katja Benrath and Tobias Rosen’s “Watu Wrote/All of Us.”

Based in real events of a few years ago, this moral thriller unfolds on a bus ride from Nairobi, Kenya, through the civil war-torn borderland with Somalia.

A young woman (Adeline Wairimu) keeps to herself. She is a Christian, and as such is a target for the Islamic militants who ravage the countryside. At one point she reveals that her husband and child were murdered by a militia; she is only taking the risk of returning to her home town because of her mother’s failing health.

Understandably paranoid, she bristles when approached by a Muslim teacher (Abdiwali Farran) heading north for the birth of his fifth child. But when the bus is stopped by trigger-happy militants and the Muslim passengers are ordered to identify their Christian fellow travelers, the result is an I-am-Spartacus moment that hammers home themes of personal bravery and shared humanity.

Technically proficient and brimming over with slowly-building tension, “Watu Wrote / All of Us” sticks with the viewer long after the lights come up.

| Robert W. Butler

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2017 OSCAR-NOMINATED DOCUMENTARY SHORTS

February 8, 2018 by butlerscinemascene

OSCAR-NOMINATED DOCUMENTARY SHORTS  Overall rating: B+ (Opens Feb. 9 at the Tivoli)

“TRAFFIC STOP” (USA, 30 minutes)  B+

Breaion King doesn’t look like a candidate for a roughing up by the police.

She’s an elementary school teacher (a good one, if the footage we see is to be believed), a churchgoer, a dancer and singer.

Of course, she’s also black, which may trump all of the above.

In 2015 King was stopped for speeding by Austin, Texas, police officer Bryan Richter. She questioned whether he had stopped her properly, then asked him to hurry up in writing the ticket.

The confrontation and violence that followed were captured by Richter’s dash cam.

Kate Davis and David Heilbroner’s thought-provoking doc (it debuts Feb. 16 on HBO)  balances harrowing police footage of the arrest  (and King’s subsequent squad-car conversation with one of the officers) with scenes from her daily life.

Although she had never been in trouble with the law, King said that when she now Googles her name, she mostly gets hits connected to her arrest: “You get over the physical. It’s about getting over the spiritual and the mental.”

Her lawsuit against Officer Richter is pending.

“HEAVEN IS A TRAFFIC JAM ON THE 405”  (USA, 40 minutes) A-

Frank Stiefel’s “Heaven is a Traffic Jam on the 405” is a celebration of the fantastic art of Mindy Alper.

It is also among the cinema’s finest depictions of mental illness.

Alper is a brilliant artist specializing in line drawings and monumental papier mache sculptures. From childhood, though, she has suffered from depression and other mental/emotional issues which are only kept at bay (sometimes not successfully) by a daily regimen of antipsychotic drugs.

Alper tells her own story here, often in a peculiarly slurred voice (the result, possibly, of extensive shock therapy) and employing bizarre linguistic tics (especially when it comes to numbers…she describes 40 as “four circle”).

But while Alper sometimes struggles for words (at one point she didn’t speak for nearly a decade), there is no mistaking her fierce intelligence. She may have mental issues, but she is no fool. She recognizes how disquieting a presence she offers, but can’t do much about it.

And yet her inner light bursts through in her transcendent art.

“EDITH + EDDIE”   (USA, 29 minutes) B+

Beautiful, sad, infuriating and gut-wrenching, “Edith + Eddie” is a heartbreaker about late-in-life romance and honest-to-God death-by-broken-heart.

The widowed Eddie and Edith met playing Lotto. It was love at first sight. They married at ages 95 and 96 and live together in the house Edith and her first husband bought in 1960.

But now their lives are threatened by a family squabble.  Edith’s daughter Patricia, who has power of attorney (Edith has a mild case of dementia), wants to take her mother to her home in Florida, several states away.

Edith protests, saying that in the past Patricia’s husband has abused her. Eddie, who has never flown, refuses to go. He will be left behind.

Meanwhile Edith’s other daughter, Rebecca, who has cared for her mother for years, suspects this is all a plot to vacate the house and sell it.

Oh, and did I mention that Eddie is white and Edith is African American?

Laura Chaeckoway’s hankie-grabber concentrates on the old couple’s last days together: going to church, putting in their dentures, sitting in lawn chairs and watching the world go by.

The legal issues that are tearing the two apart are somewhat vague, but the emotion coursing through this film is inescapable.

“HEROIN(E)” (USA, 39 minutes) A

“Heroin(e)” plays like an episode of “COPS” in which all the macho has been replaced by compassion.

Elaine McMillion Sheldon’s profoundly disturbing and deeply moving look at the opioid epidemic in Wilmington, W. Va. centers on three women dedicated to saving lives and helping others get clean.

Patricia Keller is a drug court judge who mixes tough love and an achingly humane approach in an effort to keep offenders on the straight and narrow. She’s so empathetic that even when she sends a relapsed user back to jail, she assumes the persona of a mother sending a misbehaving kid off to bed with the hope that tomorrow things will get better.

Necia Freeman is, quite literally, a church lady who once a week cruises the streets handing out free lunches to addicted prostitutes. Trying to understand heroin’s pull, she queries a user and gets this response:  “For you it would be like kissing Jesus.”

Especially there’s Jan Rader, a fire department official through whose eyes we experience the epidemic.  These are mostly working class people who were injured, got hooked on pain pills and then turned to heroin. Five or six times a day she responds to an overdose emergency.  Once or twice a week she arrives too late.

“Hopelessness. Unemployment. Lack of education. It’s a recipe for disaster,” she observes. “I fear we’ve lost a couple of generations.”

“KNIFE SKILLS” (USA, 40 minutes) B+

Building a world-class French restaurant from scratch sounds like tough going.

Staff it almost entirely with recently-released prison inmates — and teach them how to cook, serve and pour in just the six weeks leading up to the grand opening — and  you’ve got the makings of a fiasco.

Except that Brandon Chrostowski’s Edwin’s Restaurant in Cleveland pulled it off.

Thomas Lennon’s film cross cuts between a handful of  ex-cons struggling to change their lives — they spend their days studying at Edwin’s culinary institute, then return at night to halfway houses and Salvation Army hostels — and Chrostowski, an aggressively upbeat mentor who as a teen faced a 10-year-sentence and has been working ever since to do the right thing. In one revelatory scene we see just what an emotional price Chrostowski has paid for his participation in this idealistic crusade.

Edwin’s opened two years ago to solid reviews and steady business, but it wasn’t all smooth sailing.  Of the original class half dropped out, were re-arrested or were dismissed for infractions.  Those who hung on, however, got a second chance at life.

| Robert W. Butler

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“HAPPY END”: Unhappy middle

February 8, 2018 by butlerscinemascene

Fanzine Harduin, Mathieu Kassovitz

“HAPPY END” My rating: C+

107 minutes | MPAA rating: R

It’s got several auteuristic moments and a bevy of solid performances.

But “Happy End” never decides what it’s all about.

At first glance one might assume that this latest effort from director Michael Haneke mostly avoids the extremes of human behavior that mark so many of his titles (“Funny Games,” “The White Ribbon,” “Amour”).   Of course even in a seemingly mundane setting Haneke finds undercurrents of perversion and corruption.

To the extent that “Happy End” has a central character it is 13-year-old Eve (Fanzine Harduin), a dour/stoic kid who in the film’s opening segment makes a cell-phone video of her hamster succumbing to an overdose of Mom’s antidepressants. Hmmm.

Shortly thereafter Eve’s mother dies after a long bout with mental illness and the girl relocates to the mansion occupied by her father, the surgeon Thomas Laurent (Mathieu Kassovitz), his second wife, their newborn son, and other members of the extended Laurent family.

Among these are Eve’s aunt Anne (Isabelle Huppert), who operates the clan’s construction business and is currently occupied with a fatal on-site accident.

Anne’s son Pierre (Franz Rogowski) — Eve’s cousin — is second-in-command and being groomed to take over the business, but it’s pretty obvious he lacks the head or the instincts for the job. He’s depressed.

Jean-Louis Trintignant

Hovering in the background  is wheelchair-bound grandfather Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant), who may be slipping into dementia and who has his heart set on suicide…though he can’t get anyone to cooperate in his quest for self-destruction.

There’s considerable ugliness percolating beneath the bourgeoise surface of the Laurent clan.  For example, the tech-savvy Eve discovers  that her Papa has been writing explicit erotic emails to a mistress. The girl accepts this with a shrug.  It’s pretty hard to shock her…she oozes the seen-it-all ennui  of a 50-year-old.

And Pierre seems to be totally losing it. He shows up at the wedding of his mother and her English beau (Toby Jones) with a half-dozen African refugees, demanding that they be given a table at the reception.

Haneke’s handling of all this is bleakly comic…but never actually funny.

Making “Happy End” worthwhile is the performance of young Harduin, whose Eve is both compelling and creepy. Whatever genetic sins the family possesses seem to have found their way into her small frame; she radiates a cool pathology that you can’t quite put a name to.  Let’s just say that in some regards “Happy End” bears a resemblance to “The Bad Seed.”

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“HOSTILES”: Funereal Western

January 25, 2018 by butlerscinemascene

Christian Bale

“HOSTILES” My rating: B-

133 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Westerns have always been a guilty pleasure (violent melodramas aimed at little boys and grown men who still think like little boys), but one cannot recall another Western that so openly oozes guilt as does “Hostiles.”

Written and directed by Scott Cooper (“Crazy Heart,” “Out of the Furnace,” “Black Mass”) and based on a 20-year-old manuscript by the late Donald E. Stewart (“Missing” and three of the Tom Clancy/Jack Ryan films), this revisionist oater unfolds in 1892 when the Indian wars are winding down and the frontier is giving way to civilization.

But not quite yet.

Capt. Joseph Blocker (Christian Bale) rounds up renegade Indians.  His methods are matter-or-fact brutal. He nurses a slow-burning racial hatred fueled by the ugly deaths of comrades over the years and the atrocities he’s witnessed.

So he’s furious when for his last mission before retirement he’s ordered to accompany Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi), a dying Cheyenne war chief, from a New Mexico prison to his tribe’s hunting grounds in Montana. No sooner does their little expedition get out of sight of the fort than Joe claps irons on the old man, less to prevent escape than to humiliate the cancer-riddled warrior.

Wes Studi

Joe is, of course, a direct descendant of Ethan Edwards, the Indian-hating antihero of John Ford’s great Western “The Searchers.” Both films are about a character on a moral and geographical journey.

The difference is that everyone in “Hostiles” is being eaten alive by hate or regret.

Joe’s second-in-command is Sergeant Metz (Rory Cochrane), who’s been diagnosed with “melancholia” but more accurately is being consumed by his conscience after decades of dogged persecution of Native Americans.  Then there’s Corporal Woodsen (Jonathan Majors), a black buffalo soldier who found acceptance in the white man’s world by hunting down another minority.

A young lieutenant (Jesse Plemons) straight out of West Point is about to get a crash course in frontier justice. And then there’s the military convict being taken to another outpost for hanging after butchering a local family. An old colleague of Joe’s, the prisoner (Ben Foster, naturally) wonders why he’s going to swing when he’s seen Joe do worse.

Finally there’s Rosalie (Rosamund Pike), traumatized almost to insanity after witnessing her husband and children slaughtered by renegade Comanches in the brutal episode that opens the movie.

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“CALL ME BY YOUR NAME”: Summer of discovery

January 18, 2018 by butlerscinemascene

Timothee Chalamet, Armie Hammer

“CALL ME BY YOUR NAME” My rating: A-

132 minutes | MPAA rating: R

“Call Me By Your Name” could be categorized as a coming-out story, but that’s oversimplifying things… like saying “Citizen Kane” is a movie about the newspaper business.

Director Luca Guadagnino (“I Am Love,” “A Bigger Splash”) and screenwriter  James Ivory (yes, the director of “Howards End,” “A Room with a View” and the Kansas City-lensed “Mr. and Mrs. Bridge”) are painting on an intimate canvas here, yet their adaptation of Andre Caiman’s novel is an epic of mood and emotion.

It’s about youth, sexual awakening, family love and the warm glow of summers past. It’s enough to make you swoon.

Set in the summer of 1983, “Call Me…” chronicles a lazy but significant six weeks for 17-year-old Elio (an unbelievably good Timothee Chalamet).  The son of an American father and an Italian mother, he’s been raised in Italy with all the intellectual stimulation he can handle. He’s smart, multilingual and maybe some sort of musical prodigy.

Enter Oliver (Armie Hammer), the American grad student hired by Elio’s professor father (Michael Stuhlbarg) for a summer of research on Roman statuary. Oozing a big grin, Yankee self-confidence and nonchalant studliness, Oliver makes a big wave among the town’s young women.

Initially this visitor strikes Elio as arrogant. But Oliver also stirs something else in Elio. Not that Oliver seems at all receptive…if anything he appears oblivious.

Interestingly enough, it’s Elio’s father and mother (Amira Casar) who first notice the slow-burn sexual sizzle that’s been introduced to their household…not that they comment on it directly. But their sidelong looks speak volumes. (They must be the most understanding movie parents of all time. Atticus Finch could take lessons from them.)

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“PHANTOM THREAD”: Epic self-absorption

January 18, 2018 by butlerscinemascene

Daniel Day-Lewis

“PHANTOM THREAD” My rating: B 

130 minutes | MPAA rating: R

“Phantom Thread” is an exquisite love story.

“Phantom Thread” is a cynical black comedy.

That both of these statements are accurate suggests the complex mix of ideas, emotions and impulses percolating through Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film.

That “Phantom Thread” also features what is allegedly Daniel Day-Lewis final screen performance (he and Anderson collaborated earlier on “There Will Be Blood”) makes it a must-see event.

Reynolds Woodcock (Day-Lewis) is the premiere dress designer in ’50s London. He caters to the rich and titled; his fashions are elegant and controversy-free.

His effete manner and rep as a lifelong bachelor might suggest to some that the graying Reynolds is gay, but they’d be wrong. Reynolds enjoys women on the physical level.  In fact, as the film begins he indicates over breakfast to  his sister-collaborator-facilitator  Cyril (Leslie Manville) that his current paramour has worn out her welcome.

It falls to Cyril to deliver the bad news and escort the rejected young woman from the premises; a great artist like Reynolds cannot be bothered with such mundane duties.

“Marriage would make me deceitful,” he says, as if using and discarding women somehow makes him honest.

Anderson’s screenplay follows Reynolds on a side trip to his family’s seaside cottage.  At a local tearoom he encounters  Alma (Vicky Krieps), an Eastern European immigrant waiting tables. She’s a woman with a real physical presence, not one of those wraithlike models he’s used to dealing with, and she knows nothing about Reynolds or his work.

Her lack of guile, non-glamorous appearance and forthright emotional bearing appeal hugely to the jaded dress designer. He brings her to London, installs her in his household, looks to her as his creative muse  and, finally, marries her: “I feel like I’ve been looking for your for a very long time.” Continue Reading »

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“SMALL TOWN CRIME”: More, please

January 18, 2018 by butlerscinemascene

Robert Forster, John Hawkes

“SMALL TOWN CRIME”  My rating: C+ 

91 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Ex-cop Mike Kendall is a “shit heel” according to one of the other characters in “Small Town Crime.” It’s hard to disagree with that assessment.

Mike is an alcoholic who’s usually wasted by noon. He drives his souped-up car like an irresponsible teen; one morning he awakens to find his ride parked in the front yard amongst the wreckage of a picket fence.

Mike has been jobless since the unfortunate incident that led to the death of a fellow patrolman. To keep getting unemployment benefits he goes through the motions of applying for jobs, but should a prospective employer actually show an interest, Mike scotches the deal by confessing to being a hopeless drunk.

The good news is that Mike, as played by the great John Hawkes, isn’t a mean drunk. He loved being a cop and has a hopeless dream of once again wearing a badge. And despite his maddeningly childlike behavior, he’s just charming enough that you can’t hate him.

This noir drama from siblings Echo and Ian Nelms finds Mike thrust back into the game when he discovers a young woman dying in a roadside ditch. His cop instincts kick in, and despite warnings from his old colleagues on the force, Mike starts poking around into her death.

Posing as a private detective, he contacts the girl’s rich grandfather (Robert Forster), who is infuriated by the cops’ sloppy handling of the case (“To them she’s just another toe tag”). Despite his granddaughter’s self-destructive history of drug addiction and prostitution, he’s ready to spend big bucks to find out how and why she died.

Mike’s dogged digging eventually reveals a murderous conspiracy.  Before it’s over, other young prostitutes are being murdered and Mike is himself a target.  Not to mention his “sister” (Octavia Spencer), with whom he grew up in foster care, and her husband (Anthony Anderson) and their kids.

 

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“THE POST”: Do the right thing

January 11, 2018 by butlerscinemascene

Meryl Streep, Tracy Letts, Tom Hanks

“THE POST” My rating: B+ 

115 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

Steven Spielberg’s powers as a storyteller are so secure that not even the miscasting of one of “The Post’s” two leads can do much damage to the narrative.

This sprawling effort — it begins with a firefight in Vietnam and winds down with a firestorm over the Second Amendment — hits the ground running and rarely slows down for a breath. It’s like a Spielberg master class in taking a complicated story and telling it cleanly and efficiently.

And like other major movies about real-world journalism — “All the President’s Men” and “Spotlight” especially — “The Post” could hardly be more timely.  With a president who shows every indication that he’d love to roll back freedom of the press, this film is so relevant it hurts.

The subject, of course, is the 1971 scandal over the Pentagon Papers.  That massive study, commissioned by LBJ’s Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, looked at American involvement in Vietnam going back to the Truman administration. It revealed that the experts had always known a land war in Vietnam was unwinnable — but had plowed ahead anyway, sacrificing billions of dollars and countless lives on what amounted to political face-saving.

The papers showed that the Johnson administration had systematically lied to the public and to Congress so as to continue the war.

McNamara suppressed the study; the public only learned of its existence when one of its authors, Rand Corporation analyst Daniel Ellsberg (Matthew Rhys), made an illegal copy of the top secret document and passed it on to The New York Times.

Today  The Washington Post sits at or near the top of American newspapers (thanks to its reporting on the Watergate Scandal in 1972-’73).  But in 1971 The Post was at best a regional paper…and not a very good one.

Its new editor, Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks), was pushing it toward greatness, but still felt himself outclassed by the journalistic aces at The Times. He was particularly concerned about rumors that The Times was about to scoop The Post (and every other news outlet) with a major story.

That big story was the Pentagon Papers. No sooner had the first in a series of articles been published than a federal judge — at the behest of the Nixon administration — enjoined The Times from printing additional material.

Bradley’s Post, however, was under no gag order. Working back channels Bradley got his hands on another copy of the papers and prepared to publish even more revelations on the pages of The Post.

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“WAIT FOR YOUR LAUGH”: Ms. Show-Biz

January 5, 2018 by butlerscinemascene

Dick Van Dyke, Rose Marie, Morey Amsterdam

“WAIT FOR YOUR LAUGH” My rating: B+

85 minutes | No MPAA rating

Most of us remember Rose Marie, who died last week at the age of 94, as the wise-cracking comedy writer Sally Rogers on TV’s “The Dick Van Dyke Show.”

But that was only one stage in a show-biz career that lasted nine decades and was crammed with dozens of firsts.

“Wait for Your Laugh,” Christina Tucker and Jason Wise’s loving documentary, covers Rose Marie’s remarkable life, in the process delivering a pretty comprehensive look at the evolution of entertainment in the 20th century.

Based on a series of filmed interviews with the still-sharp-as-a-tack Rose Marie — as well as with colleagues and friends like Van Dyke, Carl Reiner, Tim Conway and Peter Marshall — the film reveals a remarkable life.

Rose Marie Mazzetta became a child star at age 4, winning a talent contest by belting out songs in the style of Sophie Tucker.  This led to radio appearances as Baby Rose Marie. When listeners refused to believe that a child could sing like that, she hit the vaudeville circuit in its final days. Audiences couldn’t deny their eyes and ears.

Al Capone and other gangsters (“the boys”) treated little Rose Marie as an adopted daughter, offering protection. They could’t protect her from her father/manager, who siphoned off millions before she was old enough to declare her emancipation. (The old man was arrested 128 times for violation of child labor laws.) Continue Reading »

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“I, TONYA”: White trash wonder

January 5, 2018 by butlerscinemascene

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.”)

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