Waterskate, or, The Battle of Wounded Knee

Rating: 9/10 (5 April 2018)

OK, let me set out at the beginning my views on the Harding/Kerrigan affair, also known as "Waterskate" or "The Battle of Wounded Knee". I have long believed that Tonya Harding was innocent of involvement in the attack on Nancy Kerrigan. I have believed this, in fact, ever since Tonya finished eighth in the 1994 Winter Olympics. It is just conceivable that a figure skater might orchestrate an attack on a rival in order to win the gold medal rather than silver. It beggars belief to suggest that she might do so in order to finish seventh rather than eighth. Tonya would have realised what the real culprits, her ex-husband Jeff Gillooly and her supposed "bodyguard" Shawn Eckhardt, did not, namely that Nancy was far from being the only skater standing between her and the gold. What Gillooly knew about skating could have been written on the back of an envelope. (What Eckhardt knew could have been written on the back of the stamp).
A TV movie "Tonya and Nancy" was made about these events a few months after they happened, but I was surprised that more than twenty years on there is still enough interest in them to justify another film on the subject. Given that Tonya has passed into folk-memory as one of the Bad Girls of sporting history, I was even more surprised that it was made from a viewpoint which contradicts that folk-memory by presenting her as more sinned against than sinning. ("Tonya and Nancy", by contrast, tried to sit on the fence as far as the question of Tonya's guilt or innocence was concerned, largely for legal reasons).
In some circles, in fact, Tonya was regarded as the Bad Girl of Skating even before the Kerrigan incident. She consistently refused to conform to the stereotype of female figure skaters as fairy princesses, and her skating style was characterised more by athleticism than by the graceful elegance of some of her competitors. She was frequently criticised for her temperamental personality, for her flamboyant costumes, generally designed to emphasise her voluptuous figure, and for her choice of music. (She preferred rock music or film scores to the more favoured classical). And although some Americans like to kid themselves that theirs is a classless society, she was criticised most of all on account of her social background; journalists and commentators hostile to her did not hesitate to denigrate her as "poor white trailer trash". (Nancy, in fact, came from a similar blue-collar background, but always found it much easier to play up to the "fairy princess" image on the ice).
Part of Tonya's tragedy was that she was often let down most by those who should have loved and cared for her, notably her mother LaVona Golden and Gillooly. Tonya had a miserable childhood, especially after her parents divorced and her father, to whom she was close, left the family home. (She was the only child of the fourth of LaVona's five marriages). LaVona was a harsh and abusive parent, frequently beating Tonya and humiliating her in public. It was largely to escape her mother's tyranny that Tonya took refuge in a disastrous marriage to the equally abusive Gillooly. That marriage soon ended in divorce, but Tonya was reluctant to admit that the relationship was over, and it was during an attempt at reconciliation that the Kerrigan attack took place.
The film tells this story in a mock-documentary style, including interviews with the characters. At its heart are two particularly fine performances from the two leading female actors, Margot Robbie (who also produced) as Tonya and Allison Janney (who won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress) as LaVona. Janney's LaVona is a cold woman, unable to feel much affection for anyone, including her various husbands or her daughter. She attempts to take credit for Tonya's success as a skater, but there is a hint that beneath the surface she resents the fact that her daughter has become one of America's greatest sportswomen while she, LaVona, has failed at everything in her life. There is another good performance from Paul Walter Hauser as Eckhardt, a man so delusional that he makes Walter Mitty look like a sober realist. In Eckhardt's imagination he is a master spy, a master detective and a master criminal, James Bond, Sherlock Holmes and Don Corleone rolled into one; in reality he is a bum and a petty crook.
Robbie's casting was criticised on the basis that she does not bear a great resemblance to Tonya, but the make-up department achieve a sufficiently convincing likeness and Robbie brings to her characterisation all the fierce never-say-die spirit that was both Tonya's great strength on the ice and her great weakness off it. (It was her reluctance to admit that she could fail at anything, be it triple axels or romantic relationships, which led to her ill-fated reconciliation with the worthless Gillooly). Robbie was nominated for Best Actress, but lost out to Frances McDormand for "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri". I have no quarrel with that decision as McDormand was indeed excellent. Nevertheless, I felt that it was Robbie's performance here, even more than Janney's which holds the film together and gives it its emotional power. "I, Tonya" is not just an entertaining movie about a news item which briefly held the headlines over twenty years ago. It is a deeply affecting story about a sportswoman of great talent whose career was destroyed, partly by a prejudiced and sensationalist media but chiefly by the man she loved. 9/10