The 2017 Tonya Harding biopic, I, Tonya, opens with a title card proclaiming that the film is "Based on the irony-free, wildly contradictory, totally true interviews with Tonya Harding and Jeff Gillooly." From the very first seconds, the film refuses to claim it's "Based on a True Story." It's based on interviews that, the audience is told upfront, can barely be trusted because they contradict each other. The film's opening shots establish a recreation of these interviews with Tonya and Jeff, as well as Tonya's mother, Tonya's coach, Jeff's friend Shawn Eckhardt, and reporter Martin Maddox, which will serve as a framing device to walk us through Tonya's life story.
While some films have an unreliable narrator, this film has six.
From the very beginning, the audience is aware that everybody involved has a motive, a reason for telling their side of the story and an image of themselves they want to convey. Before we even see Tonya, we see the other interviews as the characters talk about their own reputation or Tonya's. Jeff Gillooly laments his infamy and ill-advised mustache. Tonya's mother defends herself against Tonya's assertion that she was a bad mother. Tonya's coach claims that Tonya is like America, either loved or hated. When we finally meet Tonya in the film, she rephrases the interviewer's unheard first question, "What's people's impression of me?" To which Tonya responds, "That I'm a real person."
The film seems extensively interested in how it's easy to forget that Tonya Harding is a real person when seeing her in the center of one of the most dramatic incidents in sports history. The assault on Tonya's skating rival Nancy Kerrigan, supposedly arranged by Tonya and/or Jeff, is a story still wildly disputed today.
Consistently throughout the film, the uncertainty of the narrative and the unreliability of its narrators are established in unique visual ways. A scene where Tonya chases Jeff through their home with a shotgun is broken by Tonya in the scene turning to the camera to announce, "I never did this." Some moments have Tonya's and Jeff's interviews in split-screen as they recount the same conversation, word for word, but with wildly varied intonations. A training montage of Tonya's preparation for her second attempt in the Olympics begins with her running through the woods with a bag of dog food on her back while Tonya explains while she runs, "This is how Rocky trained to fight the Russians." And as if knowing the audience would find this hard to believe, the film pans to Tonya's coach during each strange training ritual, saying, "She actually did this... and this... and this."
The audience is never allowed to forget how subjective these moments are, how hard it is to prove what is real and what is not when the people claiming to be telling the truth have such a high stake in how the story is received.
Just as often as the film continues to cast uncertainty over what is being shown, it also offers exact recreations of some of Tonya's competitions, her wedding, and actual news footage covering the assault on Nancy. Most impressive is the competition where Tonya lands the first triple axel in US women's skating history. Over the credits at the end of the film, the actual video of Tonya's performance plays, and everything from her costume to her hair to the awed and relieved expression on her face the moment after she landed the jump had been perfectly rerendered by the film. In these few scenes, the audience is grounded back in reality, in facts that can be proven and moments that were documented.
(Tonya Harding training after Nancy Kerrigan's injury at Clackamas Town Center, 1994)
Despite being based on a true story, I, Tonya never claims to have the full truth. The first half of the film shows Tonya fighting to earn her place in the skating world which is so concerned with physical presentation and reputation. The second half offers the audience the opportunity to question everything they think they know about the Incident: Tonya's reputation, Nancy's reputation, and the way those reputations were created. As Jeff himself says, "Everyone remembers the incident differently and that's a fact." The film seems satisfied with its own lack of answers, content to introduce the audience to the real person, Tonya Harding, who factually will forever be the first American woman to land a triple axel in competition. You can create your own opinion on the rest.
Comments