As this was one of the most talked about films last year I was inevitably going to watch this and it helps that I actually do have some memories of the incident as it’s called here. Funnily enough I was one of those mentioned in the film as remembering it as being Tonya Harding herself who assaulted Nancy Kerrigan. Though it looks like a documentary, I think it’s fairer to think of this as a biographical film.

In between interviews with their present day selves, the film shows Tonya’s life beginning with how her mother LaVona forcefully convinces coach Diane Rawlinson to train her despite her being only 4 years old. As Tonya grows up, LaVona emphasizes her skating training at the cost of everything else including her education and is abusive in forcing her to train. At the age of 15, she starts dating the older Jeff Gillooly and eventually marries him. Her career goes well at first and she becomes famous for being able to perform the so-called triple Axel jump. Despite her technical ability however, she fails to consistently win competitions which she attributes to her unconventional style and her redneck background as the judges prefer a more wholesome image. After she fails to win any medals in the 1992 Winter Olympics, her career seems to come to a premature end. However she gets a second chance when the Olympics Committee decides to hold the next Winter Olympics in 1994. Even as she trains, she fears not being able to qualify for the US team and Jeff concocts a scheme to put her main rival Nancy out of the running. At first, he plans only to scare Nancy with death threats through his friend Shawn Eckard but Shawn ends up going further than everyone expected.

Director Craig Gillespie seems to make much of the fact that this film was based on interviews of all the key characters but their accounts contradict each other in numerous ways. The film deals with this by filming the most dramatic accounts, usually involving Jeff or LaVona beating Tonya, interspersed with their denials and plenty of fourth wall breaking commentary. Personally I found that the contradictions don’t really matter that much as the differing accounts don’t change the overall picture. It’s easy to discern that Tonya was abused to some extent and that both Jeff and LaVona have both convinced themselves that it wasn’t that bad. The interview with Shawn is fascinating in that the man is clearly insane but this film isn’t about him. Still, I appreciated this as an overview of Tonya life and an exhaustive account of the circumstances that led to the Nancy Kerrigan attack. It’s true that there has already been many such accounts and this might have been superfluous if I had already watched the previous ones but all this is new to me so both my wife and myself were enthralled by what is after all a very dramatic real-life story.

More intriguing to me is that this is a tale of a child genius who never quite manages to make it. As she claims herself in her interview after performing the triple Axel in competition for the first time, she was arguably the best female skater in the world for at least one brief moment in time. But as she had never won a medal at the Olympics, it never crystallizes into solid reality. At the same time, we can how precocious and talented she was as a child and yet that isn’t enough. She still has to undergo years of grueling training, endure untold abuse and sacrifice almost everything else. The film claims that she was held back by US sports officials, Jeff confesses that he ended up hurting her career and her poor background meant that she didn’t have the material resources to realize her full potential. Yet in the end the fact is that she didn’t make it. It makes for a sobering lesson in that this level of talent, effort and sacrifice is probably a necessary condition to be world’s best but not a sufficient one. We hear the stories of those who succeed and marvel at the paths they had taken. But what about all those who similarly paid their dues but fell just short of the top spot and so are forgotten? In Tonya’s case, she ended up milking her celebrity status for all that it was worth by becoming a female boxer and later when the spotlight had left her, became a construction worker.

Conventional sports biographies are usually rather boring to me but this one, as full of drama and twists as it is, was anything but. One weakness may be that Margot Robbie looks a little too old to play the role especially when she starts the role as a 15-year old Tonya. It’s only at the end of the film when they show clips of the real Tonya Harding that you realize how incredibly young she was at the time when all of this happened.