I, Tonya

[zico]

8/10. Pacy black comedy about USA ice-skater Tonya Harding, who was convicted for her involvement in the attack on her rival Nancy Kerrigan just before the Winter Olympics of 1994.

Like "Molly's Game" this is a film where a convicted criminal gets to tell her side of the story, and as you'd expect, is portrayed very sympathetically. Unlike "Molly's Game" however, this is a cracking good film. There's a serious side about how Tonya is brought up by her tough and mean mother (who gets a lot of good lines), gets into bad relationships and isn't properly accepted by the skating world because although she has great natural talent, but a redneck background and a tough attitude. Then we get into the black comedy of bungling incompetence with genuine laugh-out loud moments.

The film gets its excuses in from the very first reel, claiming to tell a true story based on irony-free, wildly contradictory interviews with the main players. It starts with the characters being interviewed many years after the "incident", recounting their view of what happens, which works pretty well, and pops up a few times in the story. There's a few "fourth wall" bits where a character might turn to the audience and say "it never happened like this", and again this works pretty well. The film shows the bleakness of Tonya's surroundings very well.

Margot Robbie is great as an angry and confused Tonya, particularly with a scene before her big competition, where she's putting on garish make-up, and looks almost clownish, but also like she's having a breakdown. The skating scenes are good, but they aren't a major part of the film. If you don't like the f-word, this probably isn't the film for you. The film does have you engaged and sympathetic to Margot Robbie's "Tonya Harding" that it presents.

It's a great film, but it's a fact-based drama, not the "truth" about the attack on Kerrigan, though I'm sure a lot of people will see it that way.