Figure skating is one of my lowkey likes, I'm not kidding. There's something absolutely enchanting about people moving swiftly, on a blade, on ice, almost as if they're flying juuust right above the ground. I love it. But I love it on a non-committed way, not gonna lie. I see all the skating competitions at the Olympic Games but I never bother myself with remembering the names of the athletes. So, yes, I very much did not know who Tonya Harding was before watching this movie.
I came almost completely clueless into this film, only knowing that 1) Margot Robbie and Sebastian Stan were in it & that 2) It was based off on the true life story of an actual figure skater. Needless to say, my experience with it (knowing so little of the story), was completely pure and honest to the film. I was caught in it because it allowed me to be caught in it, and honestly, if you don't know the story you, too, will be. And if you're all too familiar with it, then, you will want to see how they approached it.
I, Tonya (directed by Craig Gillespie and written by Steven Rogers) does an absurdly entertaining job at telling you the story of olympic american figure skater Tonya Harding (played by Margot Robbie and rising talent Mckenna Grace, as younger Tonya), from her very beginnings, with the abusive relationship she withstood with her mother, LaVona Fay Golden (Allison Janney), and her first husband, Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan), to the incident of 1994 with fellow figure skater Nancy Kerrigan (Caitlin Carver) and how her career ended shortly after.
But it's not the story -which is already interesting enough-, and the very special detail that it's a true story, what's the most remarkable thing of this film: the best part is in the way they decided to tell it.
I already said figure skating is something I find particularly lovely and entertaining, let me tell you another thing I absolutely adore (even to a higher, more invested level than I like figure skating): Fourth-wall breaking. Though it's not something I expect to be done in everything -and it certainly shouldn't be done in everything-, it's always a balm to find pieces of media that enable their characters to talk to us, the audience. - I, Tonya, surprisingly for me, did this.
Also, playing with multiple narratives was amazing, too. Though in reality I didn't feel any sort of sympathy for Harding's mother and husband, it was definitely interesting to hear their input on stuff. It gave the whole story more dimension, to me.
My rating for this very interesting biography:
