BEFORE: Allison Janney carries over from "Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children", and gets me to this one, watched on another Academy screener (but I promise to record it as SOON as it appears on premium cable...). And this allows me to kick off Mother's Day weekend in an appropriate way, since Janney won the Oscar for playing Tonya Harding's mother, and from the clips I've seen, she did a bang-up job of that. And I've circled back to Margot Robbie - if I had placed this film right after "The Legend of Tarzan", I would have gotten here too soon. But by dropping in the four Samuel L. Jackson films, I got here anyway, and right on time.
THE PLOT: Competitive ice skater Tonya Harding rises amongst the ranks at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships, but her future is thrown into doubt when her ex-husband intervenes.
AFTER: Tonya Harding's story is told here in the new biopic style, which allows for characters to break the fourth wall and talk directly to the audience if needed, as was done in "The Big Short" and I think "The Wolf of Wall Street", (and of course "Deadpool") but this technique is nothing new, it goes back past "High Fidelity" and "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" to early film acts like the Marx Brothers, and then all the way back to Shakespeare, really. But it's taken on a new meaning in the last few years, and that tells the audience that since the movie doesn't take itself too seriously, then we're not supposed to either, and this in turn allows for a new freedom, where the film doesn't HAVE to stick to the facts, it can present an aura of truthiness that only has to appear semi-factual, and therefore the facts don't have to get in the way of telling a good story. OK, so it was never possible to present a 100% true adaptation of life into movies, but I'm not sure that implies that we shouldn't keep trying.
So much time has passed since the 1992 and 1994 Winter Olympics, anyway, so many interviews since then, and there's been a lot of chances for people to change their stories or perhaps put new spins on the way things went down, and what led to "the incident", where Nancy Kerrigan ended up collapsed in an ice rink corridor with a broken knee, exclaiming, "Why? WHY?" as TV cameras revealed her as the entitled "America's Sweetheart" princess that we all expected she was anyway. I never realized before that Kerrigan and Harding benefited greatly by the one-time shortened period between two Winter Olympics, which gave them both additional shots at medals.
But this isn't really about Kerrigan, it's about Tonya, who had her beat six ways to Sunday when it came to feeling entitled. It's one thing to win and feel like you deserved it, but to LOSE and still feel like you deserved to win, that's another thing entirely. Yes, maybe you were the better athlete or had the better team, on paper, for a brief time. But you still have to win the game, stick the landing, get the better score, it's why we play out the games, and it's why we tell kids to never give up. Harding, for all her faults, was a better representation of the American spirit, which goes all the way back to the Tea Party and the battles of the American Revolution - win, at any cost, even if you have to cheat, and even if you have to deny wrongdoing later. (Even if you hate Trump, it's not too hard to see that he better exemplifies this American spirit. I can't stand the man, and I hang my head at each new development in the news, but I also feel in a way he's exactly what America deserves.).
It's manifest destiny, it's the takeover of Native American land, it's the Gold Rush and the Spanish-American War. You do what you have to do to win, because history is written by the winners. Once you get that medal (or that land, or that monopoly on something) you can put your own spin on the events that got you there. Provided you don't get caught, or shoot yourself in the foot. Tonya Harding had a long list of excuses, from "I was abused as a child" to claiming she never knew about any directions to take down Kerrigan, all the way down to "there's something wrong with my skate laces". At the end of the day, she didn't perform in the 1994 Olympics the way she should have, and if you believe that all the wrongdoing came from her ex-husband and her security guard, then that remains her greatest sin, not skating well when she had the biggest opportunity to do so.
Of course no kid should be abused, but neither should any kid be raised without some sense of discipline - surely there must be a happy medium somewhere in between, right? Because you can't have a champion, or any athlete, without some discipline. We've swung the pendulum too far in the other direction now, where everyone gets a participation trophy, and that's not how the Olympics work. The best thing about Janney's performance as Harding's mother is that finally someone says on camera to an athlete words along the lines of "Listen, you ungrateful piece of crap, you wouldn't be where you are if I hadn't pushed you and sacrificed for you!" and it's refreshing. This has been long overdue, where an athlete will do a press conference after a game and thank the coach, the judges, and the Almighty before giving any credit to the mother who got up early every day to make breakfast and then drove him or her to every pre-dawn practice.
Actually, I take it back - Tonya Harding's greatest sin was co-creating (with O.J. Simpson, Mike Tyson, Bill Clinton and yes, Donald Trump) the celebrity scandal culture that led us to the 24-hour news cycle. This created the beast (TMZ, Inside Edition, Access Hollywood, etc.) that still lives and HUNGERS every day, and if it can't find any nutritious food, it just creates a bunch of junk food that it regurgitates to the public, who in turn is only too happy to accept it, even though it tastes terrible and provides no sustenance.
It's another movie brought down by horrible, overused music cues, though. How many damn films have used "Spirit in the Sky" over the years? Or Bad Company's "Shooting Star", Laura Branigan's "Gloria" and Fleetwood Mac's "The Chain"? What's worse, none of these songs add any insight to the story here. So why use them? It was nice to hear ZZ Top's "Sleeping Bag" in a film, but even that was only used to show that Harding's choices of music to skate to were often inappropriate. I'll give it up for Supertramp's "Goodbye Stranger", but that was the only song here that seemed to fit in any narrative way.
Also starring Margot Robbie (last seen in "The Legend of Tarzan"), Sebastian Stan (last seen in "Black Panther"), Julianne Nicholson (last seen in "Black Mass"), Caitlin Carver (last seen in "Rules Don't Apply"), Paul Walter Hauser, Bobby Cannavale (last seen in "Lovelace"), Bojana Novakovic (last seen in "Seven Pounds"), Ricky Russert, Anthony Reynolds, Dan Triandiflou, McKenna Grace (last seen in "Independence Day: Resurgence"), Maizie Smith, with cameos from Ann Curry, Matt Lauer and footage of the real Tonya Harding.
RATING: 6 out of 10 homemade costumes
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