I, Tonya

Or: Devil Woman

You can’t write a better villain than Lavona Harding. In the skilled hands of Allison Janey, Lavona is a terrifying, magnetic force, full of the cheapest tricks and coldest machiavellian moves. The finest One feels given the appropriate budget or magic wardrobe she would become an all-powerful super villain or vicious tyrant, executing fauns and all manner of adorable woodland creatures. Since she has neither Lavona must content herself with controlling the life of her daughter, Tonya (Margot Robbie), who she badgers and beats until she becomes the greatest figure skater in the history of the world, for a hot second. And then watches the ice pinnacle of all her little girl has achieved come crashing down.

For a film that cuts right to the heart of “the incident” that rocked the world in the early nineties, I, Tonya is marvelously ambiguous. When Lavona watches her daughter’s faces you cannot tell whether the smoke-wreathed expression is stony pride or uncaring contempt. It’s a movie that tars all its subjects with the same brush. Constructed around a string of interviews by the parties involved, we just see a bunch of rednecks, wrecked by their horrible childhoods, carrying on their old games of self-aggrandizement and abuse, but on a much larger stage. Tonya just got the worst of it because, as a celebrated and unruly woman acting wild in a sport judged on poise, she twisted expectations overstepped her place and got hammered back into it.

Robbie is magnificent as Tonya, brash and well used to a beating, even as they come from every corner with sickening banality. A moment where she tries on makeup and a winning smile in the midst of a mental breakdown is absolutely stunning. She’s matched by Stan Sebastian as her witless, trigger-happy ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly, sloshing from monstrous to sympathetic. And yet, when seen in clips, both are so incredibly young, that their stupidity is in some ways more believable and much more sympathetic than to see grown adults like Stan and Robbie go through with them. Of course, stupidity and self-destructive tendencies flourish at any age, but it works best when Tonya and “Mustache” are being raked over by Lavona’s mockery, cutting open old wounds with salt and cigarette in hand.