Slam poetry in motion

Rating: 10/10 (9 February 2019)

"I, Tonya" breaks the fourth wall. It uses direct address. Tonya talks to you. Tonya has a grudge to settle with you. Throughout the film, Margot Robbie breaks character with in-scene commentary from her future self. This is how "I, Tonya" works. Robbie, in essence, plays two roles: Tonya Harding, and the actress who plays Tonya Harding. The faux-documentary version of the present-day ex-skater, the Portland, Oregon native that Robbie channels during sit-down interviews with an off-screen "documentary filmmaker"(the director also plays two roles), overlap into the biopic proper, the narrative, in which a wizened Harding seated in her kitchen, sucking down Marlboro after Marlboro, reflects on her younger self. The interjections are 20/20 enlightenments, the hindsight that a spousal abuse victim acquires after years of unlearning the learned. She was an accidental co-conspirator; she was the protagonist in The Crystals' song "He Hit Me and It Felt Like A Kiss". The interjections can also refute the situational action of the unfolding narrative. "This is bull****, I never did this," Tonya says, after she fires a rifle at her husband, the fallible narrator, who purports the incident to have happened. Jeff Gillooly(Sebastian Stan) lies to us. Jeff Gillooly tries to change history. Tonya's abusive husband says, "I never hit her." And sadly, there are people who will believe him. And that's because, in her mother's own words, Tonya Harding looked like "a bull-dyke". The tomboy reminds Lavona(Allison Janney) that, hair down or hair up, she is indeed young, twenty-three years young. When the Hardings are stopped by the police, the still-fresh blood streaking down Tonya's face should be clearly visible to the presiding cop. This officer points the flashlight towards the occupied passenger seat, but he doesn't even bother to ask a courtesy question about the battered woman's disheveled state. The cop takes one look at the "Charles Barkley of figure skating"(called so by Jeff) because Tonya possesses an unrivaled physicality that allows her to land the triple axel, and figures this woman, who is, frankly, a little on the masculine side, can handle herself and dish it out for good measure. And yes, Harding does resemble a waitress at some greasy spoon who never calls the mechanic to fix her truck. If Tonya Harding is guilty of anything, it's not being pretty in dresses like, in her own words, "a retar*ed tooth fairy".
When all the acidic sensationalism gets squeezed out from this lemon of a story, this made-for-television psychodrama on ice, the last of the dwindling media horde encamped on the perimeter outside the Gillooly house packs up. And we know why. As Jeff peers through venetian blinds, we catch a glimpse of the next ratings bonanza glowing from the boob tube aside from him. A covered body is being pulled on a wheeled stretcher into the coroner's van from the compound of a famed ex-NFL running back. "I, Tonya" picks up where the coda for "Natural Born Killers" leaves off; that bravura "year in review" stories Oliver Stone encapsulates in an A.D.D.-like channel surfing montage that underscores the decline of broadcast news and the general public's hunger for violence. In this sequence, both the O.J. trial and the Kerrigan/Harding brouhaha are included, along with the Menendez brothers, Waco, and Lorena Bobbitt, tabloid stories all, given the patina of mainstream respectability because, as the "Hard Copy" reporter puts it: "For the first time there was a 24-hour news cycle to fill." Appropriately enough, Harding would become a lady boxer, the perfect metaphor for this new wave of journalism, tabloid journalism, since Kerrigan versus Harding was the undercard for the main event: O.J. Simpson versus the prosecution.
"You think those nitwits in Zombieland remember anything?" Wayne Gacy(Robert Downey Jr.) asks a worried subordinate, who edits the latest "American Maniacs" episode, a hyper-violent extrapolation of "America's Most Wanted", which, it goes without saying, wouldn't look out of place on the current airwaves. The question is a rhetorical one. The world is turning into the dystopia that Oliver Stone predicted. Click on your flat screen right now. All the president's men just moved the goalposts again. And Martin Maddox(Bobby Cannavale), a cynic in the mode of Wayne Gale, knows, too, that a good portion of the viewing public can't tell. Oliver Stone saw the future. "I, Tonya" confirms what "Natural Born Killers" intuited over two decades ago, which was that Sidney Lumet's "Network", a speculative film about the merging of news and entertainment , and the relationship between the media and its audience, was far out, 'til time caught up, and then, wasn't far out enough.
Some people can't remember what happened yesterday. Let alone, remember the incident. Jeff Gillooly claims that there are people who believe it was Harding herself who whacked Nancy Kerrigan behind her knee with a metal rod. "I, Tonya" sets the record straight. Derrick Smith(Anthony Reynolds) and Shane Stant(Ricky Russert), out-of-state acquaintances of Harding's bodyguard, Shawn Eckardt(Paul Walter Hauser), are the "boobs" who executed the "hit" job. If the figure skater and her husband were guilty of anything, it was stupidity, Boobs, meant in the pejorative sense as "stupid" people, a description apropos of this muddled redneck crime outfit, can also mean television personalities. Mickey and Mallory are boobs. Across the bodies of these serial killers, Stone superimposes the words in white light lettering "too much television" before Mickey accidentally shoots the Indian. Wayne Gale, because he reenacts the couple's murders on "American Maniacs", turns these criminals into stars, ascending stars, whereas Tonya Harding was in descent, a falling star, that the cable news outlets followed until she fell to earth. Mickey, as played by Woody Harrelson, in the midst of a full-scale prison riot, subtly breaks character, when he says: "Murder, it's pure, but you made it unpure." That is Oliver Stone speaking, in his own voice. Harrelson is just a puppet. "Media's like the weather, but it's man-made weather," Mickey continues. That is still Stone; his hand, firmly entrenched inside the puppet head. For someone from his generation, a man who can recognize the breaching norms, the very idea of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, giants in their industry, reading from a teleprompter about warring figure skaters was a litmus test. Stone couldn't picture this. It was beyond the pale. Maddox would agree. The "Hard Copy" reporter knows that these boobs were straight out of central casting. The media turned a light drizzle into a Category 5 hurricane.
The audience threw roses at Alexis Winston(Lynn Holly-Johnson). The blind girl skates over the flowers, then falls. Her boyfriend comes down from the stands. He helps her up. The crowd cheers as they take a victory lap around the rink. Tonya Harding, needless to say, would not have been asked to audition for "Ice Castles". She doesn't look the part. Jeff leaves a trail of rose petals that lead to a refrigerator stocked to the gills with Dove bars. Ice cream on a stick is as good as it gets. She is not properly loved. She deserves better.
From her mother.
From men.
From America.
Tonya Harding may not have looked like a princess, but she sure skated like one, to ZZ Top music and blue nail polish.