The propulsively entertaining but problematic new movie I, Tonya reminds us that it’s been nearly a quarter-century since the figure skater Nancy Kerrigan was whacked on the back of the knee by a baton-wielding goon. The attack was the outcome of an insane white-trash conspiracy to give Kerrigan’s rival, fellow American Tonya Harding, a leg up at the 1994 Winter Olympics. The movie is a black comedy, the bleakest Preston Sturges slapstick tale you never saw. It’s The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek set in hell. Everybody in Harding’s life is wacky and bizarre, as in a Sturges film, but here, if a knife gets thrown in a kitchen, it’s going to end up wedged into Tonya’s arm.
Play I, Tonya at a different speed and it’s Raging Bull with the child and marital abuse directed at Jake LaMotta. Such a movie would have been unbearable to watch and would have missed the central aspect of this singular American cultural event, an early highlight of our relentless journey over these past 25 years to idiocracy. The undeniably horrifying assault on Kerrigan actually seemed mortifyingly comic at the time—even before we were introduced to the band of idiots who planned and executed the crime. Why was that?
I think it was the idea that such a raw, crazy, ugly thing could happen in a competition as ludicrously and self-consciously dainty as figure skating. Men and women mime ballet moves on ice while costumed in hideous leotards and onesies to bad orchestrations of great music or clamorous excerpts of lousy pop. They smile falsely, and in close-up at both the beginning of their routines and at the very end, their eyes seem to pop out of their heads in a manner that would make you shrink from them if they were near you on the subway.
The sport seems designed to hide the fact that it’s a sport; the axels and lutzes and whatever the hell else these skaters do are basically buried inside their routines as though the skaters are embarrassed by them. The whole business so depends on the absence of testosterone that the very idea figure-skating could stir anyone to violence seemed absurd even after it happened.
In her approach, her attitude, her very being, Tonya Harding was a challenge to the self-conception of American figure skating. Garish her outfits may have been, but the wrong kind of garish. Her makeup was heavy, as was true of her fellow skaters, but it was far more colorful. Most important, perhaps, she did not have a body that mimicked a ballerina’s but the morph of a kid-gymnast—short, squat, with thick thighs. There was nothing ladylike about her, and the word “pretty” was about the least likely one you could have used.
The same cannot be said of the actress Margot Robbie, who plays Tonya, and this is where the movie falters.
You cannot really understand what Tonya Harding was up against in trying to become the best American skater—a position she could only win through the subjective rulings of individual judges with set ideas about what a figure skater should look like—without understanding how she was harshly and unfairly judged because of her appearance and mien. The movie offers a taste of this when Tonya confronts a judge and asks why her scores don’t reflect her performance. He tells her that she’s not what the sport wants as its public face because her family values are bad.
Come on. The problem wasn’t Harding’s family values. It was her unattractiveness and inappropriately working-class gestalt in a sport whose signature figure in this country was the gorgeous haute bourgeoise Peggy Fleming—the same sort of prettiness Nancy Kerrigan approximated. The movie changes this up because what else can it do? It tries to make Margot Robbie look plain. It musses up her hair, allows her skin to look kind of mottled, and photographs her at angles meant to be unflattering. But the simple fact of the matter is that Robbie is too pretty for the role and there’s just no hiding it. All she needs to do is smile. There isn’t a figure-skating judge in the world who wouldn’t have given that smile a perfect score. Robbie acts up a storm here, and she is a very good actress, but she’s defeated by herself.
Otherwise, the depiction of Harding’s Dickensian existence is superb. She is saddled with an ineffectual rabbit-skinning father who flees her Gorgon of a mother, played by Allison Janney. Janney’s ferocious turn as the monstrous LaVona makes Laurie Metcalf’s disapproving mom in Lady Bird seem like Marmee. LaVona’s constant verbal and physical abuse drives 15-year-old Tonya into the arms of the mustachioed local loser Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan), whose mild manner belies his own constant deployment of his fists as disciplinary marital tools.
I, Tonya wants us to feel sorry for Tonya Harding, whose ex-husband and dimwit friend dreamt up the failed scheme to eliminate Kerrigan from contention that ended up with Tonya banned for life from the only activity on earth she was ever any good at. And we do . . . but it’s not really Tonya we’re feeling sorry for. It’s Margot Robbie, because she’s just so damn pretty.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard’s movie critic.
