Review on I, Tonya

I, Tonya (2017)

I, Tonya, starring Margot Robbie, Allison Janney, and Sebastian Stan is phenomenal. It's crazy at how good this movie actually is. This is told from the perspective of Tonya Harding. And at the very beginning it talks about how these are compiled from interviews and there is contradictions.

And so we're not absolutely sure what is true and what isn't, but wow, what an entertaining ride. Allison Janney plays Tonya's mom and she is despicable. Allison Janney played a terrible mom in The Way, Way Back, but she was still kind of lovable in that because she still really did care for her kids.

But in this movie I don't think she cares about her kid at all. She's a slave driver when it comes to training and her daughter. And she is just going to treat her daughter like crap to get her to do what she wants.

It is such a dysfunctional relationship, it is so scary. Because of the terribly dysfunctional relationship with her mom, you see how Tonya falls into this terrible relationship with Jeff Gagliuli, who's played by Sebastian Stan. Now I remember also David Letterman when this was going on.

The character Tonya totally breaks down that wall. She's addressing culture as a whole. Those that are just completely indwelled in the news cycle. The story of Tonya Harding is not a happy one by any means. Despite that, she becomes a very sympathetic character.

I don't know exactly how much of it is totally true, but it did change my perspective on how I thought about Tonya Harding, especially when I think back to all of the media coverage and she was just the bad guy or the bad girl as it was. But here, you actually feel sympathy for her. You feel a little sorry because of her circumstances and how she was surrounded by just a whole bunch of annoying set of people.

The character of Sean Eckert, who is her bodyguard, Jeff Gillooly's friend, he's almost cartoonish in the way that he behaves. He sits there and we'll talk about how he is trained in espionage and counterterrorism and all of these things. And he's just this fat dude who lives in his mom's house and he's in his mid-30s or maybe older than that.

He's just a loser of a person. And there's no way in the world that he is everything that he says he is, but he honestly believes it.

And so you're left wondering, is he just delusional? Is he psychotic? Is he stupid? Is he, maybe he's a genius because he's just playing this off as an alibi. And then at the very end of the film, they play some clips, some real interview clips. Oh, no, the dude's just nuts.

He actually believes that he was in espionage and that in counterterrorism. Obviously, I, Tonya, is told from the perspective of Tonya Harding. We don't see any point of view from Nancy Kerrigan or from any of the other Olympics.

What you do see is a girl who from a very young age has been trained up to be a champion at all costs and she threw everything. She's dropped out of school. She has no education, no formal education at least, because skating was her life.

The story is told in such a good way that you're drawn in and every bit of it was entertaining. Some of it was funny. Some of it was heartbreaking.

Some of it was kind of like, oh, gosh, what's going to happen next or I can't believe that actually happened. I, Tonya, should not be missed because of the storytelling, because of the filmmaking, because of the acting. It is all phenomenal and it's all done so well.

There's a little bit of nudity and sex though. There's a crap ton of language in it and some violence and mostly it's domestic violence. Actually, it's all domestic violence.

Even the attack on Nancy Kerrigan, we don't totally see. It just kind of happens and so it's not brutal in that other than the attack itself. I give I, Tonya 8.5 out of 10.

Images from IMDb

.
.

Thanks for reading!