Given the incredible word of mouth from TIFF, it’s a no-brainer decision to have Craig Gillespie’s I, Tonya released this year for potential awards. The film is a play-by-play account of what happened during the 1994 U.S. figure skating championship when Tonya Harding and her dead-beat loser of a husband hired a white-trash goon to break the leg of her arch nemesis Nancy Kerrigan. Margot Robbie plays Harding in all her blue-collar, low-rent glory. Harding was the outsider, a figure skater that lacked the class needed in a sport whose judges look for competitors to be elegantly poised. De-glamming to play a person that most of America found easy to hate in the winter of 1994, it’s not at all far fetched to wonder if Robbie could be rewarded with a nomination come next January ditto Allison Janney as her foul-mouther, chain-smoking, bird-loving mother from hell. It’s not just the actors, Gillespie borrows from Scorsese by furthering his narrative with music, especially songs from the 70s and 80s, and the ice-skating scenes are shot with virtuoso style in incredibly impressive one-takes.
Neon has set a release date for December 8th, 2017