I, Tonya

Though this film is set 25 years ago it’s an incisive analysis of Trump’s America. Or as Prince might have called it, the States formerly known as United. Tonya is the rough-hewn have-not who can’t get a break in the righteous snobby style-conscious America now under fire.

She flashes an All-American smile under her tears, make-up and shiner-patch. She becomes a world titlist at the difficult art of figure skating, but she can’t satisfy her mother, her brutal husband or the fickle public. 

Neither the breathtaking grace of her art nor the hard-won height of her success can fill the void with which her birth and restrictive upbringing have cursed her. The skating judges remain biased against her, for that class-loaded criterion “presentation.” As Tonya marvels at the sympathy Kerrigan gets, “Look, Nancy gets hit one time and the whole world shits. For me it was an all-the-time occurrence.”

As befits a film about a performer, the film is organized on the theme of performance. We’re told the story in a  variety of interviews and restagings. The telling becomes as important as the story, especially when the men’s plot against Nancy Kerrigan kicks in. 

The characters are all performers rather than persons. Tonya’s mother is a monster who rejects any tenderness from or to her daughter — and indeed turns away from every peck from the pet bird on her shoulder. She wears it to recoil from it. In her coldness and language she’s an ogre playing the part of a mother with no understanding of her lines or role. So, too, she sexualizes her daughter, to prepare for that sexualized art. Thus her description of Tonya’s supposed failure: “You skated like a graceless bull dyke. I was embarrassed for you. ” Small maternal sympathy, there.

The mother’s defense to her daughter is a classic perversion: “I made you a champion, knowing you'd hate me for it. That's the sacrifice a mother makes! I wish I'd had a mother like me instead of nice. Nice gets you shit! I didn't like my mother either, so what? I fucking gave you a gift!” Her home visit seems tender and supportive, until Tonya discovers her mother is trying to tape her admission/denial of complicity in the Kerrigan plot, presumably for her own profit. “You can tell me.”

Tonya’s husband equally veers between protestations of helpless love and beating her up. His accomplice Shawn is a live-at-home loser who seems to believe his repeated lie that he’s an accomplished international secret agent working against terrorism. This while he directs a terrorist act against America’s best figure skater.

The characters are all poor. Tonya’s mother raises her on a waitress salary, her husband with minor odd jobs. Tonya’s after-skate career is waitressing, women’s boxing and worse. But they feel an entitlement beyond their means: “I’m America's best figure skater! I don't want friggin' Eskimo Pies” — but Dove Bars. Hr husband lures her back — briefly — with a fridgeful.

The Kerrigan “incident” itself is described as the biggest stupidity in a world of stupids. Everyone here is as incompetent, unimaginative, fumbling and self-deceiving as … well, Trump’s White House. There are no ideas or logic, just reflexes. As Tonya’s mother advises, “You fuck dumb. You don’t marry dumb.” In this distortion of democracy there is no respect for knowledge or intelligence. If this story were not so tragic to its modest players and if this were not such an accurate reflection of Trump’s dumbed-down and disintegrating America, this comedy of sad errors would be hilarious. 

More to that point, as Tonya says, “There's no such thing as truth. It's bullshit. Everyone has their own truth, and life just does whatever the fuck it wants.” Her husband says of a scene we’re watching actually happen, “This is bullshit. I never did this!” Time and again Tonya contradicts herself within a sentence and it doesn’t matter. Like she’s the president.

Despite her coarseness and self-unawareness Tonya becomes a very touching figure. Her ice-rink mother determined her life from the age of three and hammered her into it. The public was hungry for someone to admire, then hungrier for someone to vilify: “America. They want someone to love, they want someone to hate.” 

That role proved as reductive of Tonya as her mother’s stardom dream was: “I was loved for a minute, then I was hated. Then I was just a punch line.” This film stops the punch line and returns the bad-joke woman to humanity. And it’s an abused, class-conscious humanity. Hence Tonya’s climactic accusation to the film audience: “It was like being abused all over again. Only this time it was by you. All of you. You're all my attackers too.”