A re-telling of events of 1994 with a slightly different perspective

Rating: 7/10 (13 September 2018)

I had mixed feelings while watching this excellent film and the great performances by Margot Robbie and Allison Janney.
I followed every second of this scandal when it broke 25 years ago. I felt as many did that if Tonya couldn't find an ice show that would let her skate to Goodfellas, she might as well quit. She definitely knew what was going on, as she admitted in a recent interview.
This film attempts to put her in a sympathetic light, and it does succeed - after all, she was abused by her mother physically and psychologically, her father left the family, she left school at 15 to devote herself to skating.
Much is made of the fact that she wasn't the typical pretty skater with beautiful skating costumes. Well, that's a little twisted, as one who followed it from the beginning and followed figure skating for years.
It may have been that behind the scenes, the ice skating profession didn't approve of her. But Tonya was pretty, despite what she says, and she wasn't the first skater who didn't come from money - far from it, nor was she the first skater whose mother sewed her costumes. Skating is very expensive, and families sacrifice a great deal to get their kids training, shoes, costumes, ice time, and everything that goes with it.
The film tries to make it seem as if Tonya was the only one with these hardships. Nancy Kerrigan comes from a middle-class family, with a legally blind mother, and if you want to talk tabloid fodder, her brother was accused of killing her father.
My major problem with Tonya has always been that she was a powerful skater, an excellent athlete, and she would have been on the Olympic team without anyone's knee being shattered. The subsequent notoriety and problems with her husband ruined her Olympic performance, which was sluggish - she was obviously out of shape. So what was accomplished?
As the movie shows us, it's now years later. Tonya was young, she made some mistakes, time to move on. After some false starts, it seems like she has. Everyone deserves a second chance. She recently made a good splash on Dancing with the Stars (which I believe pays something like $200,000 - so not bad) and she still practices her skating. She's married and has a child.
You can't leave the film without hoping that things continue to work out for her. The film gives us an interesting perspective on her early life, her bad marriage, the knee-bashing incident, and the stupid people who carried it out (some real dark comedy there).
Highly recommended, and I hope Tonya's new momentum keeps going. Time to take some responsibility instead of being a victim and move on.