I can remember hearing about the infamous Tonya Harding almost as far back as I can remember anything. I was barely one year old when she became the second woman ever to land a triple axel in international competition, and I was three when her legacy went from honored to illustrious following the attack on Nancy Kerrigan ahead of the 1994 Winter Olympics. For years I had an image in my head of a blonde woman in a leotard coming up behind Kerrigan in a hallway and bashing her knee in with a pipe. I wouldn’t know the full, complicated story until two decades later, with the airing of ESPN’s 30 for 30 The Price of Gold which unraveled the incident as a complicated web of domestic abuse, classism in ice skating, and the voracious appetite of a then-burgeoning 24-hour news cycle.
I went into I, Tonya, a new biopic about Harding, expecting it to cover much of the same ground as the documentary, but with some sex scenes thrown in for box office appeal. Instead, the film presents an unstable narrative that questions its own authority at every turn, finally giving Harding’s story the depth and complexity that one as sensational and recognizable as it deserves. We’ve all heard the adage “there’s two sides to every story,” but really, there are only two sides if there are only two people involved. In most stories, and definitely in the case of the events that led up to Kerrigan’s attack, there are many irreconcilable perspectives, including the one of ours, the insatiable public glued to our TVs. Acknowledgment of that multi-truthed reality is what makes I, Tonya so enjoyable, as it skips many of the boring tropes of the modern biopic.
As in real life, timelines, facts, and direct quotes in I, Tonya aren’t so easy to nail down. The artificial authority that normally accompanies biopics is rendered null, replaced by something truer to life — the recognition that different interpretations can exist at once, even if they butt up against each other. (Call it Rashomon on Ice.) Ultimately, the film leaves it up to the viewer to decide whom to put their faith in: longtime media laughingstock and lifelong survivor of abuse Tonya Harding (Margot Robbie), her abusive single mother who raised her on a waitress’s wage (Allison Janney), her abusive husband Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan) who may or may not have put the entire “incident” into motion, or everyone else (the public included, represented by a Hard Copy producer played by Bobby Cannavale). The choice of whom to trust seems easier at times than others. Though Harding is the film’s hero, she doesn’t emerge without having her own believability put into question.
As the film recounts the early days of Harding’s and Gillooly’s relationship, Harding’s account of domestic violence is denied and destabilized by those around her, just as happens in real life. Instead of just showing Gillooly denying what Harding says happened, the film puts his account into action, as it does with Harding’s. In one scene, after portraying the abuse from Harding’s perspective, she shoots at Gillooly with a rifle as he recounts the event in a voiceover. “This is bullshit, I never did this,” says Robbie as Harding, cocking the gun one last time.
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In I, Tonya’s requisite training montage, Harding works out in the dance studio, on the ice, and in the Oregon woods as her coach, played by Julianne Nicholson, looks on. “She actually did this,” she tells the audience as Harding jogs past her with a bag of dog food over her shoulders. “And this,” she says as Harding flips logs in the background. “And this,” she says as Harding finishes a run while carrying four full gallons of water. The constant reassurances give the impression that perhaps Harding didn’t do these things — that their inclusion is necessary to burnish the myth of Harding as hard scrabble soldier, a living meme about grit and effort. But considering Harding’s training exercises are the least contested parts of her infamous story, perhaps they really are true, cinematic convenience and all. Such is the way the film has the audience questioning not only the characters, but the film’s motivations as a whole, something films based on true events are usually all too eager to obscure.
We, too, see the characters working in the moment to destabilize each others’ handle on reality. At one point, Harding is preparing to take to the ice when a spectator begins hounding her with jeers of “You suck!” That spectator, viewers learn, was paid to do so by Harding’s mother. Once on the ice, Harding manages to land the triple axel that once defined her career (before the Kerrigan incident, of course). Did Harding’s mother pay a heckler to motivate her daughter or bring her down? A cut to her stern face after Harding lands the jump could be interpreted either way. No character breaks the fourth wall to give us a ruling on whether or not what we saw was real.
Nor do they in a scene where Gillooly fires a gun at Harding, the bullet ricocheting off the pavement and hitting the side of her head. Several witnesses see a gun-wielding Gillooly putting a bleeding Harding in the car, and something is clearly wrong, but no one stops him. As they drive down the street, a police officer pulls them over and sees Harding is injured, but leaves her be after confiscating the guns and alcohol in the car. “Jeff can talk his way out of anything,” Harding says to the audience. We don’t hear what he says to the officer, but we can be sure he didn’t admit to beating his wife. The scene, set to the song “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart”, is tragic, because of the acts of physical violence it depicts and the emotional violence wrought by having one’s reality denied by supposedly objective onlookers.
“It wasn't my fault,” Harding frequently exclaims when things go wrong, as when she loses her coach after throwing a skate at her head. But the film is unsparing in showing how those people did take advantage of her, differing perspective or not. “I thought it was my fault,” she says when recounting the abuse she experienced in her marriage, a crucial difference from her regular refrain. I, Tonya never simplifies or minimizes abuse, instead admitting how complicated and crazy-making it can be. It’s easy to see oneself in Harding, the misunderstood underdog who never got a fair chance at success., but the audience is present throughout the movie, in the crowds of television cameras, reporters, and spectators that closed in on her in her worst moments.
With every fictional movie about real events come the steady revelations of all the included inaccuracies and fabrications. 2002 Best Picture winner A Beautiful Mind portrayed John Nash as working at the Pentagon during the time when he actually worked at RAND Corporation. 2015’s Straight Outta Compton obscured Dr. Dre’s history of abusing women, and cut artists Tairrie B and J.J. Fad from the story completely. Just earlier this year, Jada Pinkett Smith revealed a number of fabrications included in the Tupac Shakur biopic All Eyes on Me. Biopics will always present a carefully elided version of the truth — maybe because one of its subjects is a producer, or maybe because they just need to settle on a safer run time. It's maddening when these movies are then taken as documentary by audiences who haven’t upped their critical thinking skills, but as a cinematic phenomenon it seems fairly impossible to prevent.
Are there inaccuracies in I, Tonya? Yes. We know so from the outset because the film doesn’t make any promises otherwise. “That’s the story of my life, and that’s the fucking truth,” Harding says at the film’s end. What else can somebody say about everything they’ve been through? Even with all of the news footage and stories available, getting to the heart of the incident that came to define Harding means wading through years of he said, she said. Refreshingly, I, Tonya resists fact-checking, and emerges as one of the truest biopics I’ve ever seen.
