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Old February 8th, 2018 #1
steven clark
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Dec 2003
Posts: 2,277
Default I, Tonya

This is a film about Tonya Harding, and it's personal for me. I remember her claim to fame, and my mother became addicted to watching figure skating at that time, becoming a Nancy Kerrigan groupie.
I avoided the movie because I thought it would be sleaze, but I, Tonya is actually a good film and will give WN some food for thought.
Tonya Harding is portrayed as a working class kid driven to skating by her mother, the most monstrous, God awful bitch I've seen in movies for a long time. Her mother slaps Tonya, insults her, makes her skate until she pisses, all the time saying she's doing this to make Tonya tough. At a skating event, she even hires a lout to heckle Tonya.
It works, and Tonya has a lot of talent as a skater. She also has drive, and even drops out of school to keep skating. Her mother is as crazy as ever, constantly smoking as well. The actress who plays her keeps the madness in narrow eyes and a constant drone...sort of like crazy people we've all known, and in fact both women remind me of the family my brother married into.
Tonya learns to shoot from her father, a decent but cold guy who finally takes off. When Tonya's mother stabs her with a knife...well, Tonya stays, and meets the second nut in her life, Jeff Gillooly, a meek, nice guy...until he slaps her around. Tonya slaps back, and a lot of critics claim this is funny. No, it's not.
Tonya continues skating and breaks records, but her blue collar/redneck life is looked down on by judges, who want skaters to be nice and represent middle class values. They prefer Nancy, who plays the game of Miss Pretty. Tonya keeps on skating and showing them, and somehow, 'the incident' comes to pass...where Nancy Kerrigan is attacked. The movie shows it masterminded by Shawn Eckhardt, Tonya's body guard, played by a guy who looks like John Candy's brother, and a loonie who claims to be a counter terrorist expert, among other dubious titles. He has some goons attack Nancy (the plan was originally to write death threats), and the plot crashes and burns like a dozen or so conspiracy theories we see on the net.
I liked the way Tonya is depicted, as surviving between terrible and ridiculous, and showing how her flaw was not running away from people like her mother and Gillooly, but how you get emotionally attached to people like this. it's messy, but it's life.
The film was directed by an Australian. It captures the blue collar world pretty well, and I like how it's an all white cast (except three cops are played by blacks). The director does the usual hate conservatives...in Eckhardt's room (he lives with his parents), there is a large poster of Reagan to remind us how stupid he is, and the movie has Tonya and Gillooly address the camera as they're older...arty touch, and Tonya says how there is no real truth, only what we experience...a way to get her off the hook in the vicious and brainless attack on Nancy?
But I think the film shows blue collar life with sympathy and understanding. As Alex Linder says, we should be receptive to films that do this.
I do think the Eckhardt scenes are funny, and he reminds me of a lot of people in our movement, who talk about how tough they are and how knowing, but when the FBI comes, he tries his little tricks, then breaks down and rats, and wears a wire to trap Gillooly. Too many jerks like this in our movement.
Interesting the director is Australian, much like the director for another film, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, is Irish. American directors seem to have written America off, like Alex said, the people who run America have declared war on the people who are America.
The only thing I wish is the ending hadn't been so downbeat. Tonya actually has become a welder, painter, has a marriage and a child, and hunts with a bow. She also saved a woman's life once by using mouth-to-mouth.
Also, after she was disqualified from skating in America, she was offered a chance to skate for Australia but turned it down, because she said she was American and only wanted to skate for her country.
So, for all the baggage in her life, that's a silver lining.
 
 

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