Tonya, Tonya, Tonya!
Samir: With the next Winter Olympics looming on the horizon, marketing geniuses have decided it is time to tell us Tonya Harding’s story yet again, in a feature film rather than a documentary. Over the years, this whole Tonya and Nancy saga has become figure skating’s Rashomon, and we’re here to parse out whose story makes more sense I guess. It was certainly entertaining as both dark comedy and drama. How did it strike you? There’s been a lot of convo about making comedy out of the abuse scenes in some cases. But we’re fans of Mommie Dearest, so…
Margaux: First of all, it’s been a while since we’ve reviewed a movie proper together, it’s good to be back, and it’s very fitting that our first movie back is about a topic we’re both passionate about, the 1994 Olympics. And Nancy v Tonya, of course. I had really high hopes for this, which is usually where I tend to go wrong in my movie going experience, but I, Tonya more or less delivered for me. There are some minor quibbles with direction choices and casting – not a performance level, but on a shallow looks level. It’s very obvious to me why Allison Janney is now nominated for her performance. It’s a terrifically acted movie that is aided by a really good soundtrack, and presents a theory about the knee-capping that hadn’t been re-hashed to death before. Where do you want to start?
Samir: Well, where does one start in this story? To go all film school, I remember Werner Herzog’s Minnesota Declaration, where he disparaged the “truth of accountants” and the “ecstatic truth” that could only be accessed by stylization and fabrication. That’s rather like the difference between the technical merit (truth of accountants) and artistic impression (ecstatic truth) for which Tonya’s skating was judged. In this story, we have a battle between these two as was always the case with Tonya’s skating. The fact sheet of what specific elements were done is a less revealing picture of the performance, than the performance itself. We have an abundance of truth, lies, and parsing out what we think the truth is from how we analyze Tonya’s behavior, and the many versions of things. And then there’s how the film is constructed to present Tonya as a complex human being, and how things felt/were. So let’s start with the technical elements, the so called facts of this story and the movie’s version. How much of what you saw did you think to be an indisputable fact? Her abuse is one place.
Margaux: I implicitly believe all the abuse, and then some, detailed in the movie took place, it all tracks for me. Especially once you get to know LaVona, fiction based and non-fiction, since the movie blends documentary footage with its dramatization. It all makes perfect sense that Tonya would turn out to be the Frankenstein LaVona made her into. Sure, she pushed her to winning, but at what cost? I feel I,Tonya takes a Devil’s Advocate stance when presenting their version of the story. When you first meet LaVona, she’s smoking (what looks like a Clove, which is a whole other level of hardcore chain smoker) ON THE ICE while berating Tonya’s future coach, Diane, into taking Tonya into her class. To call her mean would be too gentle, she drips with disgruntled superiority, determined to put down everyone who’s ever had the audacity to engage in conversation with her.
Samir: “Lick my ass Diane, she’s 12 and she can do a fucking triple!” LaVona gets the best lines in the film, and I agree with what you said about the soundtrack, the choice of “Devil Woman” to introduce Tonya’s mother was perfection. It matters less whether she said every word uttered in the film than that they present an image of the mother Tonya knew, and whom Diane knew. I believe from what we’ve seen of LaVona that it didn’t require much tweaking to make her an entertaining character. This film relies heavily on ESPN’s 30 for 30 The Price of Gold for many of the verifiable facts, and some of the dialogue too, particularly that cop’s line about not putting your criminal enterprise on Visa that came straight from the Boston Globe reporter in the ESPN film. But the film is also very reliant on the now legendary documentary by Sandra Luckow, who knew Tonya back in the day, and made the film Sharp Edges as her Yale thesis, about Tonya and her life (there’s now a Facebook page advertising itself as “the original Tonya Harding movie”). That’s how we know what Tonya’s disheveled home looked like, to verify the poverty in her life, her insane mother, and that the parakeet on Allison Janney’s shoulder is not a figment of Tonya’s imagination, for instance.
Margaux: Sandra Luckow’s film school thesis is now as synonym with the Tonya/Nancy story as the story itself, I wonder if she knew what a little of piece of history she was capturing. Anyway, Sharp Edges (which sounds like a YA novel series) definitely helped set the tone for I, Tonya and they even incorporated Tonya’s infamous line about her mother, “she’s such a bitch”, which sounded a lot more loaded than just a teenager complaining about their parent. Speaking of stand out performances, it didn’t matter how many different 80s wigs they put on Margot Robbie, I couldn’t see her as Tonya, but she more than made up for it in the way she sounded. I thought Robbie took on Tonya’s mannerisms and speech patterns perfectly, it was almost hypnotic. What I didn’t like was the fact that was temporarily attracted to Jeff Gillooly, but I blame the actor, Sebastian Stan, who is generally attractive.
Samir: OMG, I know, when we saw that glimpse of his ass, and he then when he comes running out in his tighty whiteys, I swooned. Then I was like, wait this guy’s an asshole isn’t he? i thought that was a general problem throughout the film actually, they made everyone just a bit more attractive than they were in life. Margot Robbie, though great for the reasons you mentioned, just seemed too slight and delicate to play the buff, hard-scrabble athlete who landed a triple axel, she looked more like the ice princess that everyone said Tonya couldn’t and wouldn’t become, by nature and by choice. That line about her mother in Sharp Edges is so revealing in context too, because you witness the real Tonya deflate under the words she hears on the other end of the line, which we don’t hear ourselves before she gives her dramatized version of the call after she hangs up.
Margaux: I agree with you about Robbie being naturally more inclined to be an Ice Princess than a tomboy who shoot rabbits on the weekends. And she also made some those of otherwise hideous skate dancing outfits looks like couture off of fashion week. But I was impressed on the way they shot the ice skating routines, usually when they cut to the body double, you can tell – or at least you notice a slight difference in performance, and maybe it’s the speed of which jumps and spins happen, but I thought it was really well shot and didn’t take you out of it. When Robbie lands the triple, I thought she nailed the look of joy although nothing really tops Tonya’s pure expression. The best reaction shot was everyone in the stands is on their feet except for LaVona. Whatta bitch.
Samir: Interestingly enough, they had to digitally recreate the triple axel because they couldn’t get any doubles who could perform it. Just as a testament to that accomplishment, there are only a couple of women who can do it right now and they look nothing like her anyways. I think they put Robbie’s head on another skater’s body in some shots, and in some Robbie is actually skating. She trained with a coach and a famous choreographer (Sara Kawahara) to learn to skate. She committed a lot to this role, and even produced the film, so this level of devotion to the character I think shows how deeply she connected with Tonya. Tonya gives her so much to work with, as the kind of person whose life experiences led her to always make the choice that was to her detriment, when she approaches a fork in the road.
Margaux: I think, and the movie revisits this well often throughout, every wrong choice she makes stems from having an abusive mother, and father who basically abandons her. She was never taught any life skills outside of skating, so how would she be able to differentiate between right and wrong? I, Tonya also posits that the beginning and end of all her bad decisions start with meeting Jeff. Which turned out to be leaving one abusive situation for another, thus repeating the cycling all over again.
Samir: The movie I think does this really powerfully with the steak knife scene (a story contested by Harding’s mother). After this scene, is we get a moment that, while never happened in this way, is composed from other moments in Tonya’s life at this time and presented as a confrontation with the judges on the ice. After she tells a coach to “Suck my dick” she has a fit and throws her skate at her coach and fires her. It’s literally a repeat cycle of the scene with her mother, only this time Tonya is throwing the blade at someone else. Tonya is set up as someone who absorbed her upbringing, and actually makes it more plausible that she would become a person who at least played a part, in whatever fashion, believing that the best way to guarantee her path to the Olympics required a plot that involved hitting someone.
Margaux: And, to be fair, they make it plausible for Jeff to think that way as well. What’s most striking to me, between this movie and the ABC special that coincided with the release of I, Tonya are two things. One, Tonya, and Jeff to a lesser extent, really suffered from a lack of education and obviously, a support system. Which are the two things that Nancy Kerrigan always had and was the real built-in advantage she had over Tonya and no matter how well Tonya skated, wouldn’t have. And the second is, Tonya needed to open up her own car repair garage post-figure skating career because if there’s one thing I’ve learned watching various documentaries about her over the years, girl can fix a car. Monetize that shit! Make your logo you wacking a tire with a tire iron, but you’re in a skating outfit. Ya know, something like that.
Samir: Exactly. In my experiences knowing abused youth, it takes a long time to get over certain built-in feelings. I’ve seen kids who still look longingly at someone else’s plate at dinner, even though they have a plate in front of them and ha’ve been fed regularly and well for years, after years of starving and struggling before. You can’t erase the scars, and I think the film does a good job of showing that to expect Tonya to make good decisions was to expect she have a different upbringing altogether, which was not something she could control. But the film also makes a great point throughout that she was full of excuses for things she could control.
Margaux: I loved that the film included her infamous skate lace gate where she stopped a minute into her Olympic performance, after almost missing her call time, and threw her ice skate up on the judges table while crying. It’s moment from the film that make it hard to agree with the comment that this movie seeks to redeem Tonya, because I, Tonya pulls no punches (pardon the pun) and doesn’t seek to rosy up her image. Every real-time critique of her that was hurled at her during her active skate years was reflected in the movie. We saw an example of her slacking off and her blaming her skates, costumes, the time change, the day of the week, etc. It wasn’t super flattering.
Samir: She had a reputation for mysterious costume malfunctions too, starting and stopping performances leading up to the 1994 Olympics. She even wore one of the costumes whose strap came undone at a previous performance. She contradicted herself frequently too. The long-standing rumor is that Tonya called in her own death threat (which the film contextualizes differently) because she didn’t want to have to qualify for 1994 nationals by going to the regional and sectional competitions, even though she would likely have won them easily. The film starts with the sounds of her coughing then lighting up a cigarette. Back in the day the TV coverage made all kinds of drama out her asthma, we always saw Tonya coughing after a performance, and it became a criticism of her when journalists turned on her. So the film, while portraying Tonya in greater detail and humanizing her, never produces hagiographic devotion and I don’t detect any sense that they were trying to change her reputation, but merely looking for the human story behind a vilified public person. That infamous moment with the skate lace was a great way of showing the same information from the mediated sensational side and the human experience side. A lot was made of her not having a spare lace at the ready, her phony-sounding “It’s not gonna hold me line” and not being able to tie her laces herself in the moment. But the film simply reminds us that frayed nerves make simple tasks difficult sometimes, and it makes us connect to her on a human level. It’s not like this was the Olympic moment she was dreaming of. She helped create it, but that doesn’t negate the fact the she still has feelings, which it was de rigeur to forget in the simplistic villain storyline. The overriding tale of the movie is that her life and her choices led her to being a person who would tragically never figure out how to capitalize on her gifts, and who could never get out of her own way.
Margaux: Exactly. And as you noted, in Tonya’s repeated apologies throughout the years, she always specifies how she’s sorry she associated with “the wrong people”, ie: Jeff, his weirdo buddy Sean, and two dipshits from outta town. I loved how inept the movie portrayed the fray of Jeff’s “entourage”. First of all, Sean is written to be the stereotypical man who lives his parents basement. If Sean were to be contextualized for present day, he’d be the kind of person who watches YouTube conspiracy videos all day long. Oh yeah, and has an unshakeable belief that he’s an FBI or CIA agent. I, Tonya’s theory on the attack is that it was sort of a misunderstanding. After Tonya receives a death threat, Jeff and Tonya thought it’d be a good idea to interfere with Nancy’s practice time in the same way, but obviously they couldn’t have it traced back to them, so they employ Sean. Motivated by greed and shot at fame, Sean ups the ante and gets two bozos to break Nancy’s knee(s). As far as the movie shows us, it was news to Jeff and Tonya that Nancy was physically assaulted, and that Tonya had long since checked out of this plan and focused her energy on training. They did include that Tonya did call to find out when and where Nancy was practicing, but it could be explained away that it took place during the “fake death threat” phase of planning and they wanted some credibility. One thing I didn’t realize was that they guy who did the whacking used his own head to smash a glass pane in order to escape. That’s really something.
Samir: Yes! That was a factual detail actually! He didn’t realize that door would be locked because it wasn’t when they “staked out” the place, and instead of using the baton in his hand he head-butted the glass. This aspect of the story really gave everyone the most fun (despite certain journalists’ insistence that this plot was seriously at one point to kill Nancy, which it never was). Sean had fake IDs verifying his career as an anti-espionage agent, it was next level delusion. He was even selling this plot to his accomplices as a way to inspire a spike in requests from figure skaters for bodyguards, that they would then fill.
Margaux: Truly a moronic plan. It’s not only laughable on paper, it is the darkest miracle to of ever occured because those fucking idiots aren’t capable of tying their own shoes, let alone pull this off, and yet they did. I guess this was their “one” cause everyone gets one.
Samir: And they even got the doodles and handwriting recreated exactly on the envelope that Tonya writes the information down from that call. It’s interesting to see that level of detail in a story that’s comprised of mediated visions of all these people. The handwriting Tonya swore wasn’t hers, but the FBI says was. So much is questionable, because Tonya Harding has been telling stories for so long that the fact and fiction have melted together. But those details make us question even further how deeply she was involved. We only ever knew Sean through our introduction to him as a body guard, and his interview with Diane Sawyer, so throughout the film that is how we see him when interviewed, through another screened media filter. Speaking of interviews, now seems a good time to contemplate the artistic impression of the film.
Margaux: It is because my next point was going to be about the breaking of the fourth wall whether you liked it or not. It didn’t work for me. It wasn’t consistent enough for it land. There were a few funny moments, mainly when Diane is at the Kill Bill-like training sessions with Tonya when she turns to camera and says, “she really did that”. But mostly the moments came out of nowhere and ultimately gave the scene a strange robotic quality to it that was a disservice to the story and the acting.
Samir: It’s funny because so much of the story was muddled by the media frenzy it spawned, that at times you need someone who was there to tell us if something we are told, in any version of the story, is true. At other times having the characters’ voiceover transition into that character speaking directly to the camera, speaks to the film’s depiction of the story as one composed of such confusing admissions and direct addresses through the lens of news cameras, but ultimately doesn’t actually benefit most of the scenes where they do this.
Margaux: I liked the framing device of grounding us in the “present” (a few years post attack) with an interview or documentary crew filming Tonya in her kitchen chain smoking, and Jeff in a different kitchen, sans mustache, but an upsetting goatee. They retell the events as they remember them, we’re told the story in flashback, I thought the set up had a familiar quality to it that wasn’t forced, which is probably why the Ferris Bueller of it all stuck out even more to me. Overall, I, Tonya managed to strike a delicate balance somewhere between the truth as characters remember it and what it probably was. The scene where Tonya discovers she’s banned for life from figure skating was heartbreaking, you could feel such a significant part of life just died in front her, and no matter what you think she did, that punishment did not fit the crime.
Samir: The film did a really good job of building to that moment. I think this is what the Team Nancy people feared – that by showing Tonya as a complex human being and reminding us of the severity of what she endured as a child and adult, and what her life was like outside of the special interest stories showing her fix cars in her spare time, that she would reap some positive benefit from her crime. They thought it ironic that she was at the Golden Globes during the #timesup movement inauguration, because she was involved in an act of abuse on another woman, forgetting that she herself was a victim of abuse many times over. At one point Tonya in the film says “Nancy gets hits once, and the world shits. For me it’s an everyday occurance” a fact that gets minimized or lost too easily when we revisit this story. In light of such a life, it makes sense that Tonya in the film questions the existence of truth itself. Hers and the film’s fabrication, all leads us to feel for Tonya in a way we never had before, and to experience her truth. And it isn’t lying, and it doesn’t absolve her of anything, because it does so.
Margaux: I think this is the first time Tonya hasn’t been positioned as the villain at the center of the story, more of a tragic hero, and in a lot of ways, that’s what this movie special and interesting. Her last betrayal by her mother is a real kick while you’re down moment, but their entire relationship was nothing but cruelty, so it was just par for the course. Both actresses, I feel, earned their nominations in I, Tonya and I appreciate the films dark humor throughout. It was a risk that paid off, mostly. Overall, I’d say I, Tonya is a solid B+ for me. How about you?
Samir: I would agree, a solid B+ in my book. I loved that the film ended with that video of her performance at 1991 US Nationals. After all, the purest, most authentic Tonya Harding that anyone ever saw during those years, was that moment she landed her first triple axel in competition. You get to see what this talent we’ve been talking about looks like, what a triple axel looks like. You see what was created by digital effects in the film is like in reality, on video, the way we learned everything we knew about Tonya before. And it is how people who don’t really watch figure skating will learn about her now. Do you think we’ll be talking about this in another 4 years, or will this film have put the cap on the Tonya Nancy drama?
Margaux: I’d like to think this is the end of rehashing the Tonya/Nancy story, despite the fact that I am still obsessed with it, but knowing Hollywood, they’ll just turn this into a Hulu drama next year or something.
Samir: In the meantime let’s pay a visit to that museum, THNK 1994 (Tonya Harding Nancy Kerrigan 1994). I think we can satiate ourselves with the Tonya’s Wheaties boxes and Nancy trading cards until that day comes.
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