Review: I, Garbage
Everyone knows the dramatic story of Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding. I, Tonya, then, is naturally a movie everyone will flock to, depicting one of the most talked about news events during the beginning of the 24-hour news cycle. I, Tonya is a dark comedy biopic that tells the story of Tonya Harding’s life leading up to “the incident”- as they call it. The film is based on “totally contradictory, totally true interviews”, as the opening title sequence tells us, and stars Margo Robbie as Tonya Harding, Allison Janney as her abusive Mother LaVona Golden, and Sebastian Stan as her equally abusive husband Jeff Gillooly. The film has breakout performances that have been earning Janney critical acclaim this entire awards season. When I have something positive to say, I never know where to start. When I have something negative to say, I just want to jump right into it.
Let’s jump right into it then. Here are three quick bullet points as to why I, Tonya was not a great movie and why it needs to not be nominated for anything when nominations come out tomorrow for the Oscars. 1. Figure Skating Scenes. The figure skating scenes were actually painful to watch. Between close up shots of her footwork to establishing shots of the arenas, the green screening was so painful. It’s like someone just cut Margot Robbie out and pasted her in this poorly edited and painfully fake skating arena. How are we supposed to take the triple axel seriously when it is humorous how poorly performed it is? Everything was fake. In one of the opening scenes, Gifted star McKenna Grace played little Tonya Harding and her face was blurred and cartoonized when she was skating around the ice. My jaw dropped and I let out a gasp; looking around at the sold out theater around me, I swear no one else even flinched.
If you’re going to argue that’s the point of the film, that it is all this hilariously bad unbelievable story of this real American tragedy then let me bring it to my next point…
2. Let’s Beat Everyone But Make it Funny.
The common theme of the entire film is abuse. Emotional, physical, spiritual abuse. Every character has abused another character. It’s hard to find any redemption in any of these real life people. Picture this: Tonya is getting beat up by her mother in one scene; cut to her mother making a joke about how it wasn’t that bad, or how she needed it to fuel her skating fire. Call me old-fashioned or just too sensitive but the entire real life story of Tonya Harding suffering with broken bones and black eyes and then having them crack jokes seems in poor taste. I didn’t really find any jokes of this film funny, but deeply disturbing instead. Meanwhile the sold out theater reacted completely the opposite and hooted and hollered at the one-liners. Such a crowd-pleasing reaction, though, belittles the very real pain of the abuse, right? 3. Breaking the Fourth Wall Like I stated earlier, the film is based off of real interviews from the players involved. During the exposition of the film, we are introduced to everyone via interviews which will act as the spine for the film. The film bounces from interview to dramatization- if that’s what you want to call it- and back again. We have Robbie talking about how she was raised by her mother and then we see a scene of Robbie and Janney interacting but someone turns to the camera and say, “This really happened” or “This never happened”. This style would have worked if it stuck around. But instead, despite being essential to the beginning of the story, it faded. The entire second and third act of the film did not show the characters interacting with the audience again, which gave the entire film this disjointed feeling, bouncing around in the timeline. It would have worked for the film better if they decided to do this the whole time, or never did it at all. When the audience is aware that the characters in the story know they're watching, it changes the narrative of the film and you can’t really change it back. Don’t get me wrong, I am a huge Allison Janney fan. I will probably name my first born CJ Cregg, but if you’re putting her against Laurie Metcalf in Lady Bird, excuse me. There is no competition. Metcalf should win every time. I think it’s a sad excuse for both a comedy and biopic, but what do I know, right? Everyone seems to love it. In my opinion, if you want to see a winner from this Oscar season, watch Phantom Thread instead.