![]() After one of Jeff’s bullets grazes Tonya’s head, a cop pulls the couple over en route to the hospital. It’s not just LaVona and Jeff, the two people she’s closest to, who seem at peace with the idea that Tonya’s body should be a punching bag as well as a record-setter and a moneymaker. In one uncomfortably funny scene, Tonya dryly notes that she’s being beaten once again as her husband slams her head into a picture on the wall, her head cracking the glass in the frame. The ironic distance derived from the film’s framing device and fourth wall–breaking helps emphasizes the drab ordinariness and the utter acceptability of such cruelty. ![]() Tonya moves in with Jeff after her mother throws a knife at her daughter across the dining table, the handle sticking out of the skater’s upper arm, a violent tableau all the more jarring for its near inexorability.īecause physical aggression was what Tonya had always known, why would she expect anything different in her marriage? The abuse that Jeff visits upon his bride, motivated in large part by his jealousy over her success, is both spectacular and mundane: slaps in the car, punches at home, guns pulled on each other. “Maybe he should hit you,” says LaVona one night at the dinner table after a minor disagreement. Harding primes, then pushes, Tonya into an early marriage with a physically abusive partner. The 20-something Jeff picks up the teenage Tonya at the rink, and from the start, LaVona disapproves. I, Tonya toggles between its protagonist’s meteoric rise and her emotionally grueling home life, first with her mother, and then her husband. In contrast to many a Hollywood blockbuster, where humor is used to leaven the violence on screen, I, Tonya’s buoyant, bobbing tone accentuates the tragedy of life under the fist of Damocles. That refusal of sentimentality allows the film its greatest strength: the rare nuanced depiction of partner abuse. Practically zippy at times, with brief, puckish scenes hopping between decades, I, Tonya rarely wallows in dolefulness, despite the many misfortunes that fall upon the Harding household. Frump-ified in Pringle-curve bangs and a series of tight, uncomfortable smiles, Robbie masterfully plays Tonya from her gawky wunderkind adolescence to the middle-aged ex-skater in the current day. Opening with a postmodern preamble explaining that this version of events is based on “irony-free, wildly contradictory, totally true interviews” with Harding and her ex-husband Jeff Gillooly (now Jeff Stone), the chatty, fourth wall–breaking black comedy-think The Big Short on ice-conveys much of its humor and humanity through fictionalized talking-head interviews with Tonya, Jeff (Sebastian Stan), and her mother LaVona (Allison Janney).
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