An American Tragedy, on Two Levels

Rating: 8/10 (6 January 2018)

As I wend my way through a plethora of films up for various SAG Awards _ an unusually diverse group including the likes of "The Shape of Water," "Darkest Hour," "Downsizing," "Lady Bird," "Get Out," "The Big Sick," "Call Me By Your Name" and "The Disaster Artist," among others _ I find, much to my surprise, that the one I like the most is the one I thought I would like the least: "I, Tonya."
"I, Tonya," directed by Craig Gillespie from a script by Steven Rogers, is a biographical film about the disgraced figure skater Tonya Harding leading up to and including her involvement (or not) in the 1994 attack on her American Olympic teammate Nancy Kerrigan.
The film is a deeply moving study not only of a troubled young athlete and her dysfunctional family, but a convincing treatise about class distinction in the United States and how it can manifest itself in complex, easily dismissed and misunderstood ways.
For example, when the movie-Harding confronts a skating judge after losing a competition she justifiably thought she had clearly won, the judge says the jury's vote was not about skating but about not wanting to be represented by someone from the wrong side of the tracks. Among other things, she makes her own skating costumes, which are clearly not in the class of those worn by the more well-fixed competition.
The movie begins in the 1970s with Tonya, then 4, being shoved down the throat of a local skating instructor by Tonya's mother, LaVona Fay Golden, played by veteran Allison Janney ("The West Wing") as a kind of more obvious and profane Nurse Ratched, the ultimate rotten stage mother incapable of love and caring even when it comes to her own child at her most needy and vulnerable.
When the instructor balks, the mother levels the other skating tots with a coarse putdown usually not reserved for children (strong language permeates this script, another not-so-subtle reminder, and not an unbiased one, of the class distinction motif).
Tonya is played with breathtaking _ and there's no other word for it _ effectiveness by Margot Robbie (who also produced). Robbie, a real beauty, makes herself much less so without the theatricality so often displayed by actresses when they are called upon to play more threadbare characters. Robbie is Harding right down to her toenails, whether providing commentary about her life as she smokes a cigarette at her kitchen table, or skimming along the ice with honest-to-goodness athletic virtuosity.
Sebastian Stan as her boyfriend-turned-husband, Jeff Gillooly, whom Harding marries as much to claim independence from her mother as because of true love, is excellent as he walks the fine line between being physically and emotionally abusive even as he fights to defend her honor.
The attack on Kerrigan is re-created in a chilling, violent street-crime-meets-the-Keystone Kops way that works in showing both its grotesque and tragic possibilities while exposing the ridiculousness of the misguided logic behind it.
Julianne Nicholson, Caitlin Carver and Bobby Cannavale are completely believable and moving in supporting roles.
The film is described as a black comedy that uses occasional mockumentary techniques (like having characters break the fourth wall and speak right into the camera), but I would beg to differ.
This is an American tragedy _ a tragedy in which America itself was complicit.