Women in Film: 2018 Best Actress Characters - 3

As we continue our countdown of the five roles that have netted their actress an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress, we come to the film I, Tonya. The film focuses on Tonya Harding, who, like Kay Graham whom we focused on last week, is based on a real person.

I, Tonya is based on the true story of the figure skater Harding’s dramatic fall when her husband was convicted of plotting against Tonya’s rival, Nancy Kerrigan. The film was written by Steven Rogers.

The film was produced independently and the actress, Margot Robbie, played an active part in getting it made. She said that the script pulled her in immediately. But it was a tough sell and became a small, independent film with a budget of only $11 million, which is not much by Hollywood standards. Robbie said she didn’t want to wait 10 years until she became a bigger name to be offered challenging roles—and as she said about this story: “I was captivated. It was a bizarre, unconventional, crazy, fun, sad script and it felt very original. It was like nothing else I’d ever read before. Of course, once I realized it was a true story, I was definitely hooked.”

So just what was it that hooked Robbie? What was it about this character that drew her in?

There’s a complexity to Tonya Harding that one would never have known had we just seen footage of her skating, footage of her explaining her part [or lack thereof] in her husband’s criminal scheme, footage of the public things that happened to her. Luckily, this film has the guts to go inside Harding’s life to look very carefully at her relationship with her husband and her relationship with her mother—the two relationships that were a big part of her life.

For writers, this is a great script to study because it manages to go through nearly four decades of Harding’s life by using the technique of an off-camera filmmaker to whom Harding, her mother and her ex-husband seem to be telling their various versions of the story. This technique was used very well in the 1995 film Die Hard written by Buck Henry. Structuring the film this way lets the story jump around very quickly from year to year, decade to decade, and we see the story unfold in a myriad of times—and not always in a linear fashion.

The character of Harding is absolutely fascinating. She is so driven, yet her support system is almost nonexistent, she’s so vulnerable, so lonely, so unsure of herself as a person, and in many ways, though skating allows her to shine, it also is the architect of her demise. Poor Harding really never stood much of a chance.

One thing I love about the character is that she’s not just one thing—she’s multi-dimensional as a person and as an athlete. She is absolutely fascinating. She’s not all good and she’s not all bad. She’s real.

Here’s hoping we see more real women on the screen, women who may be flawed but are never dull!

Copyright © Diane Lake

18Feb18

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