I, Tonya

It’s a cliché to announce at the beginning of your movie “based on a true story,” but it’s almost become as much of a cliché to now be tongue-in-cheek about it. “Based on wildly contradictory interviews,” the opening to “I, Tonya” proclaims. It tells you two things about this movie: that it thinks it has a blank check to take as many liberties as it wants with Tonya Harding’s (Margot Robbie) tabloid story, and that this movie wants to have a sense of humor it maybe doesn’t deserve.

That’s because “I, Tonya” feels tone deaf in trying to meld the goofy, unreliable testimonies of Harding’s family and cadre of rednecks with a more sobering story about domestic abuse and mental torture at the hands of her husband and mother in her pursuit to be the best. It’s a movie about domestic abuse, but hey, let’s try and be funny and edgy too!

The film will get a laugh from Harding’s mother (Allison Janney) screaming, “Lick my ass” right after she’s berated Harding for trying to make friends with her fellow skaters. Or later it’s often flippant about Harding’s husband (Sebastian Stan) beating her before turning it into a steamy makeout session. Redneck axioms and words of wisdom will be passed off as fact. And Gillespie will lean on Fleetwood Mac, Heart or the Violent Femmes as a way of lightening the tone, but it’s an oddly placed soundtrack that always feels about 10 years off from where it takes place.

Janney gives a fiery, profane performance as Harding’s vicious mother, but Gillespie doesn’t tease out the complexity of her work. She comes across as one-dimensional, aided by how she’s always clutching a cigarette with a vicegrip or her apathetic, spiteful expression behind droopy bangs and big glasses. Robbie on the other hand has a lot of range. She can be cold, ruthless and jaded during her testimonial interviews, whip smart and vulgar just like her mom when she’s barking at judges or at her husband, or she can even reveal her vulnerability. In one scene, we’re staring head-on at Robbie as she stares back at herself in the mirror moments before she’s about to compete in the Olympics. Her anxious, terrified glare peeking out from underneath her pounds of makeup and a pasted on smile looks like something out of “Raging Bull.” It’s a magnificent moment in an otherwise frustrating film.

In fact, it’s one Scorsese-ism in “I, Tonya” that doesn’t feel cloying. We get voiceover narrations, re-enacted cutaways and characters even directly addressing the audience to tell us the exaggerated image of Harding chasing out her husband with a shotgun didn’t really happen. Or did it? Who cares? “I, Tonya” is all over the place with its style, as it’s part sports movie, part caper, part glossy biopic.

But while we know the movie is taking liberties in some storytelling aspects, it isn’t as perceptive in how it overstates Harding’s influence on figure skating. This is coming from Harding’s perspective, who describes herself as one of the best figure skaters in the world at one point. And she chalks up her failure on the major stage to being a rebel who didn’t get her fair shake from snobby, elitist judges who wanted a princess like Nancy Kerrigan rather than her trashy, redneck upbringing. There’s likely some truth to that, but the movie never questions that notion from a perspective other than Harding’s, and it ultimately treats this class-bias dynamic as fact.

It’s another example of how “I, Tonya” skates around tough subjects, hard truths and even an unlikable protagonist. Like Harding as a skater, “I, Tonya” is technically proficient but can never quite stick the landing.

2 stars