“All of the characters are rebellious and wrong-headed, and I wanted the screenplay to be that, too.” — Steven Rogers, screenwriter of I, TONYA, at the Film Independent screening at LACMA, December 8.
I, TONYA—director Craig Gillespie’s biopic of the infamous Tonya Harding and cohort—is a complicated film of multiple subjectivities. Wildly entertaining on one hand, yet occasionally squirm-making in its depiction of parental and spousal sadism as a component of a laugh-riot mockumentary.
“This never happened,” a gun-wielding Tonya (Margot Robbie) says as she glares into the camera, just before giving chase to her violent joke of a husband (Sebastian Stan) and blowing a hole through a kitchen cabinet. It’s one of the few times Tonya gets her own back during her three years with Jeff Gillooly, whom she married in order to escape the years of abuse dished out by her grenade-launching-helicopter-mom-from-hell (Allison Janney, peerless).
Tonya’s solace was figure skating, the one thing she truly excelled at. But—according to the panels who judged her performances and the media that covered them—excellence wasn’t enough. Tonya had the bad taste to be born poor, and all the choices that followed—the homemade outfits, the blue eye shadow, the crass corporate rock playlist that accompanied her out on the ice—prevented her from getting the scores she deserved in a sport where success is predicated on image as much as skill.
I, TONYA, now playing.
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I, Tonya editor Tatiana S. Riegel, screenwriter Steven Rogers, and Film Independent curator Elvis Mitchell at the I, Tonya at LACMA, December 7, 2017. Images courtesy of WireImage and Film Independent.
