I, Tonya: 2017

Last year, Allison Janney won an Oscar and a Golden Globe for her role as LaVona, Tonya Harding's mother, in I, Tonya. As a fan of Janney from her time on The West Wing and the voice of Peach in Finding Nemo and Finding Dory along with my childhood obsession with figure skating, I, Tonya seemed like a logical choice for me to watch. And it was. Oh, it was.

In the early 1990s, I was a HUGE Kristy Yamiguchi fan. I watched the 1992 Olympics with my mom, and Yamiguchi's performances mesmerized me. Here I was, an unathletic kid who could barely rollerskate and had never ice skated, and Kristy Yamiguchi made me want to don a sequined leotard and tights and become a famous Olympic figure skater. Or at the very least, a performer at the Ice Capades. (It's probably for the best that this career never moved past the "When I grow up, I wanna be" stage since the Ice Capades ended in early 2000.) Just two years later and the Winter Olympics were coming back. I was so ready to see my favorite, Kristy Yamiguchi, take the ice, but alas, she decided not to return. So that left me with a choice: Nancy Kerrigan or Tonya Harding. I went with Kerrigan, but the choice was not satisfying. Kerrigan seemed aloof and unrelatable. But when the whole break-her-knee-so-she-can't-skate attack went down, I felt justified in picking Kerrigan, Clearly Harding didn't deserve my support. I was fully convinced she had something to do with the attack.

Fast forward twenty years and here I am as an adult, aware now that ice skating is better admired from my couch than actually donning the blades myself, watching I, Tonya. In some ways, the film was shocking. I had no idea that Tonya had such a horrible life, with an abusive mom (a role that Janney most certainly delivered in) and later an abusive husband. I also didn't realize her athletic skills and hard work or the way the figure skating community completely excluded her because of her background. I know I, Tonya is not completely true; it is, after all, a biopic and thus susceptible to exaggeration at best to outright incorrect information at worst. But what set this biopic apart from other ones I've watched is the inclusion of footage at the end:

The part that caught me the most at the end here is how Tonya looks when she's in the car with her ex-husband Jeff. She looks like she's uncomfortable, like something is wrong. Seeing that in the context of the film, I couldn't jump right to "well, she's uncomfortable because she's in on the attack." Instead, I wondered about the abuse. Was she safe with this man? Is that why she looks scared?

The film is about what is true or not, and it doesn't leave the audience with a definitive answer. Perhaps the truth will never be known, but at the very least, I think Harding deserves more than what the world gave her.