Tuesday, January 09, 2018

Why I Loved "I, Tonya."

Last year, for the first time, I saw the musical "Wicked."  "Wicked" is basically the tale of "The Wizard of Oz" told from the wicked witch's perspective, with the facts re-done or re-imagined so that the story portrays the witch favorably.  It is a very entertaining story, and it asks you to assume that the facts of The Wizard of Oz are incorrect and/or distorted.


"I, Tonya," similarly, tells the story of one of history's villains - Tonya Harding - based upon interviews with the people on her side of the equation.  The movie does NOT ask you to agree that the facts are as stated by the Tonya-side folks, but, instead, acknowledges that those facts may be biased and that they are even (obviously) internally inconsistent.  Yet, dear audience member, imagine if these were the facts and then ask yourself whether you believe that these people deserve what they get/got (and whether, even if you condemn them all still, whether you can understand why they acted as they did).


"I, Tonya" works on a variety of levels:


1) It works as a historical re-enactment.    Having lived through the whole thing (I was physically at Tonya's 1991 championship performance in Minneapolis), I was amazed at the tremendous detail in the recollection of what occurred.  Tonya's ugly outfits, awful makeup, crimped-looking hair, her workout clothes, her snarky reactions and facial expressions.  I have seen hours and hours of that actual footage.  The duplication is fantastic.


There are certain scenes where I was transported to the world of lower-middle-class things in the 1970s-80s-90s.  The one phone in the house with the long cord; the fake saloon doors, the wood paneling, the crappy microwave where Tonya heats her food toward the end, it is all there, and it is all something I actually experienced in my own home growing up.  (It is worth noting here one similarity of "I, Tonya" to "Napoleon Dynamite" - if you grew up lower-middle-class outside the city and you lived in an old house, the stuff you had was generally 10-20 years behind what the rich folks had.  So, when you say "Well, geez, in 1994 there were touch-tone or pulse phones" you are missing the point.  There were also old rotary phones, and the phone company would charge you $300 a year to put in a separate phone jack.  So "my people" always kept the old rotary phone and had the super long cord.)


One IMDb commenter gave "I, Tonya" a 5/10 because he viewed the plot to injure Nancy Kerrigan as over the top and ridiculous.  Dude, it actually happened.  These morons registered at hotels in their own name and used their own credit cards.  Shawn Eckhardt told people he ran a company called something like the "Universal Bodyguarding Agency" despite the fact that he never had such a business and he had no paying clients.  This weird shit happened.  These things actually occurred.


2) It Works In the Manner of "Whiplash" or Andre Agassi's Autobiography


Both the movie "Whiplash" and Andre Agassi's "Open:  An Autobigraphy" look into the issue of what sort of person creates a champion in others.  In "Whiplash" we see the cruel, foul-mouthed teacher who (it is implied at least) causes at least one student to commit suicide and is ultimately fired.  At the end he is, again, remarkably cruel, but, it seems, (possibly?) redeemed by the fact that his pupil perhaps has found greatness to some degree....maybe?  Agassi was raised by an obsessed father who demanded he hit thousands of tennis balls a day, who used to throw his second place trophies in the trash and who used to hustle tennis games between his pre-pubescent son and people like an aged Jim Brown.  Agassi constantly states his hatred for the game of tennis.  Yet Agassi became once of the 20 best tennis players of all-time.  Would that have been possible with a normal upbringing?


Tonya Harding, it is said here, loved skating from before she was age 3.  Her mother was a cruel, foul-mouthed drunk who emotionally and physically abused Tonya, virtually every day.  She attends her daughter's first ever date and asks her date if he and Tonya have fucked yet.  She drives her daughter forward with the statement that her daughter is a nothing - a piece of crap trailer trash girl whom everyone looks down upon.  (Side note - there is a parallel here to "The Last Jedi" where Kylo Ren taunts Rey with the information that Rey is a nothing, her parents were nothing, and she has no part to play in such a grand story.  Rey, it is implied, already knows this to be true, and, as a result, it is the cruelest of taunts.).


But again, imagine Tonya Harding's parents are nice and kind and they don't care whether she skates or not.  She takes her immense talent then and what?  Skates on weekends with her kids?  She was the #1 figure skater in the world for parts of 1991-93.  When her mom says "I gave you a gift," the audience laughs.  But did she? 


3) The movie works as a story of Being Poor and Being Lower Middle Class


When Allison Janney won the Best Supporting Actress award at the Golden Globes, this theme was the primary thrust of her speech.  "I, Tonya" is a story about growing up poor and/or lower middle class and making the best of what you had while people who were your "betters" look down upon you.


My family had 5 kids, and my dad worked making about $30,000 a year.  My mom stayed home.  We were not poor, but we were not wealthy.  We had hand-me-down clothes, and we wore the $5 cheap jeans from the cheapest store.  (The scene where Jeff buys Eskimo Pies and Tonya wants Dove Bars hits awfully close to home.)  We had the same red snowsuits until we absolutely did not fit into them.  Coats and warm clothes were purchased a couple sizes too big.  Again, we were not poor.  But when my sister had boyfriends come over for the first time, they'd often remark that "Well, when I heard you lived in a farm house I assumed that it was like a big 4,000 square foot house.  This.....isn't."  Yeah, fuck you asshole.  It is our house.


Now imagine that you are Tonya Harding - even poorer than I, your mom has had 4 husbands, your dad left her and you begged him to take you (he wouldn't).  You now are in a world where the typical competitor is from a VERY wealthy family, as are most of the judges who control your fate.  Wealthy people from the city and the suburbs look down horribly on people of this sort.  We know nothing, we aren't good at anything, we are a frigging joke.  And we often deserve these taunts due to our behavior.  But man, I can tell you that when it is happening directly TO YOU, you don't engage in much self-reflection.  You generally engage in a lot of pain.


There is a lot of pain in Tonya Harding's life.  A LOT of physical and emotional pain.  And, at least it appears in the movie, NO ONE attempts to help her very much.  She must have met numerous people better off than she was over the years.  It appears that they enjoyed preventing her success and laughing at her station in life.  But no one shines as a bright light who simply sits down and says "I've got $5,000 for a costume - here, have it." or even "Let's sit down and work on your makeup together." 


4) The Movie Is an Excellent Character Study of Various People


From the crazy mom to Jeff Gillooly to Shawn Eckhardt to Tonya Harding, we see scenes which give us insight into that person's way of living.  Gillooly's physical abuse increases as Tonya's success grows.  This is not atypical if you have ever heard the classic line from a violent person of, "You think you're better than me?"  Eckhardt is everyone's lower-class, hanger-on friend who eats potato chips in the back of his car with his shirt off while regaling you with stories of great things that happened only in his mind.  Again - I have experienced that scene personally in my life.  The mom is really not all that different from my mom.  There are degrees of craziness and abuse, of course, but I can hear my mom's voice in a couple lines VERY loud and clear:  1) "You throw yourself into the air like you are the lightest thing ever, which I can tell you Tonya never was..." and 2) "I like your hair pulled back like that.  It makes you look young."  (Reply - "Mom, I am 23!").


Tonya's repeated interview mantra of "Like I am to blame for that..." and "I SUPPOSE that is MY fault" are the words of someone who is NEVER to blame for anything that occurs.  If you review her actual real-life interviews, a few things about her self-perception come across 1) she is blameless; 2) she is horribly misunderstood (and unfairly so); and 3) anything that happened to her is always inflated to a crisis - so if a skate blade has to be refigured, it cost her a title; if a skate lace breaks, she is in danger of never walking again.  This leads one, of course, to question anything she says.  Her delivery is so poor, and her words so self-serving, that you struggle to believe a word she says.  This, again, is why the filmmakers decided to start the film with the understanding that everything might be biased and internally inconsistent, but there is a story to be told here, and if that story is true, or some of it, maybe we shouldn't have so easily believed the other tale that we were told for 23 years.




Great movie.  I hope it wins an Oscar.