REVIEW / COMEDY BIOPIC

I, TONYA (M18)

120 minutes/Opens today/ 4 stars

The story: Told in a series of vignettes, this biopic of a figure-skating Olympian who falls from grace begins in Tonya Harding's childhood. Her mother, Lavona (Allison Janney), places the child in her first skating class. The teen Tonya (Margot Robbie) meets and marries Jeff (Sebastian Stan) and the pairing of abusive man and woman with low self-esteem leads to disaster, namely, the assault on rival skater Nancy Kerrigan. It has Oscar nominations for Best Actress for Robbie and Supporting Actress for Janney.

The Tonya Harding scandal, when it broke in the early 1990s, was not as broadly covered in Singapore as it was in the United States, but it did get its share of column inches.

Most people would have forgotten the details and, if pressed, most would compress and conflate memories of the news that went into their heads to spin a story about a villainess, a talentless she-demon who orchestrated a vicious attack on a superior, more attractive rival to give herself better odds.

This movie, arranged as a series of mockumentary interviews, sets the record straight about the crime. It exonerates Harding.

But more interestingly, the interviews with Lavona (Janney) and Harding (Robbie) slowly and slyly expose the false memories that viewers might have about the incident.

It accuses the audience and the media of complicity in the crime of demonising Harding,

Robbie's Harding is a woman born of generational hardship. Her mother, who raised her, is a complicated mix of tiger mum and working-class eccentric.

Janney's portrayal of Lavona is fierce and funny, but clips of the real-life Lavona shown before the end credits reveal that Janney's portrayal was spot-on and not a caricature.

At its heart, this film asks its audience to accept a contradiction, which it sells with a knowing wink and rather successfully.

The court of public opinion should clear Harding's name, says the movie, because of the facts of the case.

But it does so by substituting one seductive narrative for another: She was a victim of a feckless, abusive husband, Jeff (Stan), whose story is played here as a Coen brothers-style crime caper about a dumb man, with even dumber friends.