I, Tonya (Craig Gillespie, 2017)
Watching this in the context of Oscar season (which is January to March here, with more or less two major Oscar contenders coming out in theaters every week) really underlines the film's most important quality, which is its energy. There is a vitality, an enthusiasm to the filmmaking here that makes some of the script's roughest edges easier to forgive. This is a messy film, which - even putting aside the massive tonal shifts it goes through - asks us to believe in Margot Robbie and Sebastian Stan as 16-year old for a second there. It... doesn't work. Robbie is a bit of a strange casting choice generally, mostly because of her age, which is pretty relevant here given Tonya's relative immaturity is a pretty key element to her character... but she's so good it doesn't matter too much in the end.
It's not just about the performance though. Certainly, Robbie helps a lot with the tonal shifts, especially the domestic violence. What the film asks us, really, is to espouse her point of view as much as possible, and as such, violence is part of the film but it doesn't define it, because she doesn't want it to define her. She can't escape it entirely, as much as she tries, and that's what makes her a tragic character... how much that has to do with the real Tonya Harding I don't know, and frankly I don't care. As presented here, she's as fascinating as she is entertaining, to the point that the film does lose a bit of momentum once it gets to the "incident". Ostensibly, that should be the big payoff, and it does work well as some kind of a farcical tragedy, but the film does lose some of its focus as Tonya herself is sidelined.
Still, it does come back to her, and the scene in which she attempts to endict the whole audience feels like an encapsulation of her character, of how hard it is to settle on her: is she the kind of person that would do that ? Though the film gives a somewhat generous version of events for her, it clearly doesn't expect us to take it a face value, and that ambiguity works very well here.
8/10