The first thing I want to say about this movie, I, Tonya, is that Margot Robbie just ain’t no pretty face. She can act. I, Tonya is one of the best movies of 2017, without a doubt.
It’s almost impossible to not enjoy this movie and to not be totally immersed in it, especially if you remember the Tonya Harding, Nancy Kerrigan incident. I remember it. I remember reading about it, and I remember watching the coverage on the news about it. Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan were rival American figure skating competitors and somebody had whacked Nancy Kerrigan in the knee right before a big competition. It was soon discovered that the people who did it were connected to Tonya Harding’s then Husband Jeff Gilooly. And everybody automatically assumed, and reported as such, that Tonya Harding was behind it, because Kerrigan was a better skater than her. That’s what I remember from the news at the time. That Kerrigan was the better skater and Tonya Harding was this awful, horrible human being, who’d break her friend’s knee, just to win.
This movie, shatters, absolutely shatters, that narrative. It shows how Tonya Harding grows up, what kind of family she grows up in, how she’s treated by her mother, that she marries the first guy who was ever nice to her, because nobody had ever been nice to her in her life. And it doesn’t show all this, as an excuse. For the first time, after watching this movie, I realized that Tonya Harding had nothing to do with the hit on Nancy Kerrigan. It was all cooked up by her husband and his friends to scare Nancy Kerrigan to throw her off her game. Tonya Harding had nothing to do with it.
And then you also find out that Harding was the superior skater. She is the first woman in the world to complete an extremely complicated jump called the triple axel jump, which to this day only 4 women have ever landed perfectly. I never knew this stuff. It’s a fascinating true story of a woman who was once as famous as the president of the United States, because she was on the news more often than he was. And the story about Tonya Harding was covered in every newspaper and sports page across the world. It painted her in a bad light and destroyed her career she’d worked her whole life to build and ruined any chances of endorsement deals.
It shows you the phony and arbitrary way the judges give out points, that it’s not just about your technical skating abilities but also about your dress, or “presentation,” as the judges call it. It’s total BS.
By the end of the movie, you feel two things. You feel that you’re extremely happy Tonya Harding ended up okay. And you feel that Margot Robbie deserves a bloody Oscar for her performance.
9 out of 10. You should go and watch this movie right now. It has only grossed about $5.3 million so far. That’s absolutely tragic. Make I, Tonya the very next movie you watch. 9 out of 10.