Craig Gillespie's bitter, funny, wildly entertaining biography of disgraced Olympic skater Tonya Harding, "I, Tonya," might be titled "Sympathy for the Devil." In 1994, Harding became the public's prime suspect in a physical attack that left a rival skater, Nancy Kerrigan, unable to compete in the national championship. Harding's eventual punishment, a lifetime ban from Olympic skating, seemed like just deserts.
That's not quite the version of events we get in "I, Tonya," which alerts us straight off that we are about to go through the proverbial looking glass. A title card warns us, with a wink, that the film is based on "irony-free, wildly contradictory, totally true interviews" with Harding and her ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly, who served time for his role in the attack. These are self-serving accounts, of course, but not without their moments of truth. And as they converge and diverge, we get a more sympathetic picture of Harding than many of us would have thought possible.
In fact, "I, Tonya" casts Harding, played by a terrific Margot Robbie, as something approaching a working-class heroine, a kid from a hardscrabble family whose talent and determination elevated her to the most rarefied strata of professional athletics. The problem was, Harding didn't have the "class" to compete there. In her too-blue eye shadow and pulled-back hair, Harding never seemed to belong on the same ice as American sweethearts like Kerrigan. As one judge tells her in a moment of confidence, "It's not all about the skating, Tonya."
"I, Tonya" manages to get us almost completely on Harding's side. For starters, there's her bitter and joyless mother, LaVona (played by an unbelievably good Allison Janney), a tough-love type who forgot the love part. Harding's husband, Gillooly (Sebastian Stan), was an abusive wimp who walloped her around the house and then melted into tears. And everyone will regret ever meeting Gillooly's inept, delusional friend Shawn Eckhardt (an excellent Paul Walter Hauser).
Then there's us, the public that reveled in Harding's downfall. In one of the film's more serious moments, Robbie's Harding turns to the camera and addresses us directly. "It was like being abused all over again, only this time by you," she says. "You're my attackers, too."
