By Emilio Frenk.
Director: Craig Gillespie
Cast: Margot Robbie, Sebastian Stan, Allison Janney, Julianne Nicholson, Paul Walter Hauser, Bojana Novakovic, Caitlin Carver, Mckenna Grace and Bobby Cannavale.
Rating: Excellent.
Craig Gillespie, director of “Lars and the Real Girl, “Million Dollar Arm” and “The Finest Hours” brings “I, Tonya” a biopic that blew me away from beginning to end.
Based on true events, “I, Tonya” tells the story of Tonya Harding (Margot Robbie) a young professional ice skater from Portland, Oregon who is ambitious and suffers the constant attacks from her abusive mother LaVona (Allison Janney).
Her career will be at risked when her ex husband Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan) plans an attack against her rival Nancy Kerrigan (Caitlin Carver). This attack was considered one of the major scandals in Ice Skating history and “I, Tonya” took us through that journey.
Craig Gilliespie without a doubt directed one of his most intensive movies of his career with “I, Tonya”. The style he chose for directing this movie is very interesting. Instead of being the typical movie inspired in real life that took us to that journey, he chose a documentary style combined with fiction.
His style reminded me of the one David O. Russell used in “The Fighter” back in 2010 and this movie pays off as well.
The screenplay written by Steven Rogers plays a huge role in this film. The amount of research that Rogers made for this film was huge an I consider it challenging since we are talking about a real person who made a terrible mistake like Tonya Harding.
I loved that the film was told by multiple points of view and not only Tonya Harding´s. I liked that this movie did stuck with the facts and performance wise is one of the most powerful of this year.
Margot Robbie is incredible in this film as Tonya Harding. She plays that role with so much realism and made you understand why her character has that competitive behavior, but the one who steals the movie is Allison Janney as LaVona Miller, who most likely will score an Academy Award Nomination this year.
We are used to see her in more comedic roles but her Janney took it to the next level and I was impressed with her performance.
Craig Gilliepie not only directed a very visual film but knew how to get the best out of his cast and the result speaks for itself.
I love the fact of how Gilliespie illustrated the internal and external conflicts of all the characters, specially the main ones on Tonya Harding and her mother LaVona.
Other factor that made the movie work was the fact that it was not based in any source material and it was a deep and thorough research that Steven Rogers did in every single one of the characters he wrote and played it very well.
Craig Gillespie was very smart on using the black humor in this film despite of dealing with people who did a very bad thing. That is very difficult to achieve in a film and he did a very good job in here.
I am very sure that “I, Tonya” will be a film that people will be talking about it for a very long time and will score Academy Award Nominations most likely for Margot Robbie and Allison Janney.
“I, Tonya” is one of the best films of 2017, I highly recommend it for Craig Gillespie´s directing, Steven Rogers brilliant screenplay and the performances of the cast.