The Top 100 Movies of the '10s, #72: I, TONYA (2017)

73. THE LITTLE HOURS (2017)
72. I, TONYA (2017)



I, Tonya is the biopic that Tonya Harding deserves. It's a complex story, fitting her neither into the villain role in Nancy Kerrigan's fairy tale that the media concocted in 1994, nor into the victim role that she might project onto herself. She is both. And neither.

Margot Robbie, far too versatile to have been shoehorned into Suicide Squad, plays Tonya from her mid-teens into her thirties, with a loud and sharp dignity and a quieter deviousness. Sebastian Stan endows her on-and-off boyfriend-and-husband, Jeff Gillooly, at once with a dangerous hair-trigger and with an immature innocence. They are two kids thrust into marriage and into professional sports without much of an idea of how to handle either.

The victory in Craig Gillespie's handling of this story is that he dares to tell it all, from the horrific to the ridiculous. A lesser director would fall prey to this very true story's unwillingness to settle into a conventional tone. Moments of silly comedy lead into moments of shocking abuse, because after all, that's how it happened.

The movie is funny, and then it's horrifying. Light moments of goofy comedy--like the hilarious sequence of the knee-bashing itself by Sean Eckhardt (Paul Walter Hauser), which plays as if Ernest P. Worrell starred in Ocean's Eleven--give way to dark moments of terror. The tonal shifts are smoothed by occasional cuts to present-day narration by both Tonya and Jeff, which assure us that not only are both alive today, but they are thankfully separate from each other.

Allison Janney won a deserved Oscar for playing Tonya's chainsmoking and abrasive mother, though any of the three leads would have been deserving. The movie doesn't ask us so much to believe Tonya's story as to sympathize with her perseverance. She trained from near-infancy to fit a mold that had rejected her, and made the Olympics anyway, and might have left untarnished if not for her alleged attack. Without being naive, Gillespie finds what's admirable in that.