My stepdaughter loved it. My own opinion is that, but for the figure skating, I, Tonya would be a cinematic version of one of those journalistic "deep-dives" into the world of Trump voters. Someone said that our president got a hundred per cent of the vote among people who smoke cigarettes while pumping gas. How many of them could there be? Well, let's start by counting the parts in this movie.
It's the figure skating that doesn't go with the hardscrabble stupidity of these downscale Oregonians, and on this point the movie is maddeningly silent. It's as if Harding was one day a 3-year-old whose sociopathic mother, a waitress by trade, hustles her into a skating class at the local rink and, next you know, she's in the Olympics. How did this happen? Were one to judge from the movie, you'd have to say it must have something to do with being abused by your only present parent, molested by your half-brother, and beat up a lot by your husband. The movie's mindless shorthand for Harding's athletic achievement is a lot of loose talk about triple axels.
Really strong performances by the entire cast, however--especially, to my mind, Allison Janney, as Harding's mother.
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