Directed by Craig Gillespie
Written by Steven Rogers
Starring Margot Robbie, Sebastian Stan, Julianne Nicholson, Allison Janney
Release Date December 8th, 2017
It’s hard to pin down director Craig Gillespie. On one hand, he directed the wonderfully warm and quirky Lars and the Real Girl in 2007 but also directed the awful, unfunny "comedy" Mr. Woodcock that same year. Gillespie has since directed the remarkably dull sports flick Million Dollar Arm, the forgettable and unnecessary horror remake Fright Night and the wildly underrated and too quickly forgotten The Finest Hours. So, is Gillespie a great director or a hack? Is he an auteur or a Hollywood carpenter, cobbling together studio products?
Gillespie’s latest effort, the sports-bio-pic, I, Tonya doesn’t necessarily answer these questions. On the one hand, the film is quite entertaining with a rock star lead performance by Margot Robbie and an Academy Award level supporting performance by Allison Janney. On the other hand, the editing is often muddled as to who is recalling what portion of the story via the faux-documentary structure of the film and the tone is rather dissonant, inviting laughs one moment while asking to be taken seriously in others, especially those related to domestic violence.
I, Tonya tells the story of the life of the infamous figure skater Tonya Harding (Robbie). Tonya grew up with an abusive mother, Lavona (Janney) and a mostly absent father who taught Tonya how to hunt deer with precision and then ran away so as not to be destroyed by Tonya’s mother. As awful and abusive as Lavona Harding was, she instilled a toughness in her daughter that would become her hallmark as she rose through the ranks of American Figure Skating.
Tonya was thrown into the remarkably competitive and cutthroat world of competitive figure skating at just three years old, according to this story anyway. By the time she was five years old, Tonya had won her first competition against girls much older than her and by her teen years she was in high level competitions with the goal of making it to the Olympics. All the while Tonya faced down her abusive mother and a stuffy, unwelcoming figure skating world that seemed to have no place for someone as outlandish as Tonya, preferring the demure, classical music style competitors over Tonya’s less cultured, rock n’roll, power, and strength style.
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