OVP: I, Tonya (2017)

Film: I, Tonya (2017)
Stars: Margot Robbie, Sebastian Stan, Allison Janney, Julianne Nicholson
Director: Craig Gillespie
Oscar History: 3 nominations/1 win (Best Actress-Margot Robbie, Supporting Actress-Allison Janney*, Editing)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Okay, so we're done with the Oscars (and I am just skipping the Best Dressed list this year, because I don't think I'll have time-it's been a challenging February, guys), but that doesn't mean we're done with the Oscars because, well, we're never done with the Oscars at TMROJ (it's kind of the point of the blog), and I'm getting another review out of one of the films that won this week, because I'm behind but still want it for posterity (I don't know why I'm fighting with you, I mean, we don't even know each other).  Anyway, the only one of the Big 6 winners I hadn't gotten to on the blog yet was I, Tonya, and as it managed three nominations, it felt like the perfect way to get back into film reviews this week.  Let's do this thing, shall we?

(Real life doesn't have spoiler alerts) The film is centered on what may be the first major news story I really remember hearing about (give or take OJ Simpson).  It's hard to grasp if you didn't live through it, but for a brief series of weeks in 1994, the only names anyone in the country wanted to mention were Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan.  After all, in a sport of princesses, who didn't want to discuss one of America's Sweethearts turning out to be a wicked witch in disguise?  Harding's story is on full-display in this picture, and I actually liked most of the balance they had between her hard-scrap upbringing, her brief moments in the sun (being the 1991 US Champion, being the first American woman to land a triple axel in competition), and of course what made her infamous, her involvement in the 1994 attacks on Kerrigan.

The film itself is kind of a hodgepodge.  It frequently feels too glib, too cheeky, for my tastes.  It's the sort of movie that feels fun while you're watching it, and then the second you think about it you realize was kind of brazen and coasting off of the considerable charms of the leads.  The film itself isn't a great movie, by any measure, and I'm kind of shocked at how well it did during awards season, particularly considering that it gains most of its advantages through eye-rolling fourth wall breaking and not being a concrete story.  In a lot of ways it feels like how Seth MacFarlane would handle the Tonya Harding Story, making it as garish and raunchy as possible, and having too simplistic of a view on our main character.

That last bit is probably the film's most fatal flaw.  I, Tonya suffers depending on your views of the real-life Harding.  The film wants her to be sympathetic, perhaps as the filmmakers didn't want to tick off someone they'd have to trot out on red carpets, but Harding as portrayed in the film never jives with the woman we got to know briefly from 1994.  It's hard to imagine her being the completely innocent victim in the film, even if we can understand that perhaps a hard-scrabble life and being around the wrong men caused her to go down that road (I'm sorry-I'm never going to be convinced that she wasn't aware of the potential attack on Kerrigan, even if she didn't orchestrate and it wasn't her idea).  As a result I left the film feeling like I couldn't connect with its central premise.  I frequently complain about how real-life struggles in its conversion to the big-screen, but here even I fall victim to my own complaints.  Margot Robbie's Tonya Harding is an unfortunate victim of circumstance, someone we must pity in the confines of her confusing and fractured life.  But it's impossible for me to completely bust my real-life thoughts about Harding, whose innocence I find suspect and as a result was the sort of woman that was willing to violently destroy another person's career to further her own.

That said, the film has its stronger elements, particularly Robbie in the lead.  A game comedienne and someone who has proven to have movie star talent beneath a visage that clearly screams "big screen."  She makes Tonya human, grounding her in reality even as she fills her talking heads with a braggadocio that you see was forced upon her to survive.  There's a lot of great layers to her work here, and I liked it.  If she continues on this path of balancing commercial with the critical, it's hard not to see her landing her own Erin Brockovich in a few years.  Sebastian Stan somehow makes Jeff Gillooly seem almost sexy (everything about Sebastian Stan is sexy), but he lacks the same depth of understanding that Robbie brings to Tonya.  The same can be said for Janney in her Oscar-winning role.  She's a blast, don't get me wrong, and Janney seems like such a wonderful person in real life it's difficult to begrudge her this Oscar, but this is the sort of two-dimensional work she could do in her sleep.  In a lot of ways it reminds me of Maggie Smith in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel; yes, it's fun to watch and impossible to deny, but it's also not great acting.  That she beat Laurie Metcalf & Lesley Manville for such complicated, tough (and not always on the page) work is a shame.  Still, though, it's definitely scene-stealing.