"...so it's easier for me to put her on ice, if you know what I mean."

Rating: 8/10 (30 January 2018)

Back in January, 1994, when the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan story was hogging the front pages and headlining TV news, one had a pretty definite sense that Harding herself was a principal motivator behind the attack on her skating adversary. At least that's the way I remember things, although a couple of decades gone by has a way of distorting one's memory. This movie disavows much of Harding's culpability in the plot to harm Kerrigan, and does a reasonable job of portraying all the dysfunctional elements surrounding Harding throughout her life. With a mother like Lavona (Allison Janney), it's a wonder Harding ever made it out of childhood without becoming a bona fide mental case. Her trailer trash existence got another jolt once she took up with boyfriend Gillooly (Sebastian Stan), and if one is the least bit uncomfortable with instances of spousal abuse, scenes here will make you squirm time and time again. For her part, Harding, admirably portrayed by Australian actress Margot Robbie, didn't do much to help her own image, whether skating in front of disapproving judges or taking up with low-lifes like Gillooly and his shady friends. Not to mention smoking like a fiend while in training and competition. You'd think that cold air hitting her lungs after dragging on a cigarette would send her into a fit of coughing. When all is said and done, it's with a bit of irony that Harding herself poses one of the picture's most rhetorical of questions near the end of her story when she asks - "How am I the poor sport in all of this?"