I, Tonya (15)

Craig Gillespie

FIGURE skating wouldn’t top the list of most dramatic sports – no last-minute goals, controversial fouls, breath-taking dead heats. One website charmingly refers to "outfit-gate", when an East German skater was accused of wearing a "bizarre and indecent costume". So, not much there for filmmakers. Except, of course, for Tonya Harding, and one of the greatest sporting controversies of all.

In 1994, Harding was connected to an attack on her skating rival Nancy Kerrigan, planned by her ex-husband Jeff Gillooly. Since both she and Kerrigan were US Olympians, the attack made international headlines. After pleading guilty to "hindering the prosecution", Harding was banned from skating for life and became a national pariah.

But the facts of what happened always seemed inconclusive. How much did Harding actually know? I, Tonya isn’t about setting the story straight; in fact, the excellent script by Steven Rogers is based on interviews with Harding and Gillooly that, as replicated in the film, are wildly contradictory. And that’s the point of a canny, funny, but also very poignant film: that the media, the public, all those rushing to judge, can’t always know the complete picture.

The film’s Tonya, Margot Robbie, sets out her stall at the outset: “The haters always say, ‘Tonya, tell the truth’. There’s no such thing as truth. Everyone has their own truth.” Of course, that holds a degree of obfuscation. Yet the word "haters" establishes the film’s context, of a young woman from the wrong side of the tracks, deemed white trash by a rarefied sporting establishment that didn’t want her. Whether she knew about the failed plan to cripple a rival, or was herself the victim of an erratic, idiotic ex, desperate to make himself relevant in her life, is for us to decide.

Rogers and director Craig Gillespie present Harding’s chaotic life through a series of unreliable narrators – principally Tonya, Gillooly (Sebastian Stan) and Tonya’s spectacularly unpleasant mother, LaVona Golden (Allison Janney), each speaking to the camera and, essentially, justifying their behaviour.

Despite the sophisticated narrative weave, there’s a straight line: from Tonya as a girl with a gift for the ice that is nurtured – in a twisted fashion – by her single mother, to the unconventional young skater’s rise through the ranks, early success, and a series of career derailments that can’t be disassociated from her topsy-turvy relationship with the alternately sweet, needy and violent Gillooly.

The stand-out character is LaVona, a waitress and chain-smoking harridan who devotes herself to her daughter’s career without evident satisfaction or love. Whether dropping ash on the ice and barking at her daughter, “Stop talking to her. That girl is your enemy”, to addressing the camera as an elderly woman with a live parrot on her shoulder, it’s a tour-de-force by Janney, renowned for her television work (notably The West Wing) and making the most of her best-ever film role.

With people like LaVona and Jeff in her life, it’s a miracle that Tonya was able to focus on her skating. But like many gifted people, she comes alive when doing what she’s best at. And when Gillespie isn’t having fun with her misadventures, he’s delivering dazzling sequences of Tonya on ice – particularly when she makes history with the "triple axel", a feat so difficult that the filmmakers had to use visual effects to replicate it.