I,Tonya vs the True story of Tonya Harding

If you were alive and old enough to watch the Olympics in 1994, chances are you know about the incident with Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding. When Nancy Kerrigan stepped off the ice, an assailant used a police baton to strike her in the knee. The footage of Nancy Kerrigan holding her leg crying while saying “Why, why” was shown all over the news. The assailant was hired by Tonya Harding’s ex-husband. Tonya and Nancy were rival skaters, Nancy being the favorite of the judges. Tonya was allowed to skate in the Olympics that year but after was permanently banned from competitive figure skating. Tonya was unaware of the attack.

Tonya was not only known for the attack, she was the first ever US woman to complete a triple axel in competition.

The film I, Tonya is filmed in a documentary like style with actors portraying the real-life people. Margot Robbie as Tonya Harding and Sebastian Stan as Jeff Gillooly (Tonya Harding ex-husband). We learn more about Tonya’s childhood, her relationship with Jeff, her role in the incident, and more. One of the relationships of Tonya’s we pay attention to is her relationship with her mother. We watch her mother force her to stay on the ice despite her needing to use the bathroom (resulting in her wetting herself), hit her with a hair brush, and cut her with a knife. Both the wetting herself on the ice and being hit with a hairbrush were confirmed by other skaters who witnessed their relationship on the rink. Tonya’s mother also did make her take her class photos in her skating uniform to get photos for competitions.

The film also digs into the toxic relationship of Jeff and Tonya. Jeff was abusive towards Tonya. The film used the information given from interviews with Jeff and interviews with Tonya to show their perspectives about their relationship and the incident. The book cowritten by Tonya Harding also goes into depth about their abusive relationship. In the film we hear Tonya and Jeff's different opinion about events that occurred such as Tonya shooting a gun at Jeff.

The director could not get in touch with LaVona "Sandy" Golden so Allison Janney based her interpretation of LaVona off of an old interview and information provided by Tonya and others who were familiar with LaVona. LaVona has come out to try to dispute the interpretation of her in the film. She has admitted to spanking Tonya but nothing else.

One scene imparticular stands out because the director chose to point out the accuracy of the events. Tonya's training montage for the Olympics. Her coach speaks directly to the audience to tell us that she "really did this, and this, and this" and shows a few of the techniques Tonya used to train.

I, Tonya takes the opinions of different real life people who were apart of this historic event, and embellishes for dramatic affect to create an entertaining and fascinating fake documentary style film. People who remember the event watched the film and were able to gain a new perspective. However, some of the details are still unclear.

Here are a few side by sides of the real events vs the film: