I, Tonya

Movie
German title	I, Tonya
Original title	I, Tonya
Country of production	United States
original language	English
Publishing year	2017
length	120 minutes
Age rating	FSK 12
Rod
Director	Craig Gillespie
script	Steven Rogers
production	Steven Rogers, ; Tom Ackerley , ; Margot Robbie , ; Bryan Unkeless
music	Peter Nashel
camera	Nicolas Karakatsanis
cut	Tatiana S. Riegel
occupation
	Margot Robbie : Tonya Harding ; Sebastian Stan : Jeff Gillooly; Allison Janney : LaVona Golden; Julianne Nicholson : Diane Rawlinson; Paul Walter Hauser : Shawn Eckhardt; Bobby Cannavale : Martin Maddox; Bojana Novaković : Dody Teachman; Caitlin Carver : Nancy Kerrigan ; Mckenna Grace : Tonya Harding (young); Jason Davis : Al Harding;
synchronization

I, Tonya (English for "Ich, Tonya") is a biopic about the former figure skater Tonya Harding by Craig Gillespie with Margot Robbie in the title role. The feature film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2017.

As part of the Golden Globe Awards in 2018 and the Oscar ceremony in 2018 was Allison Janney each as best supporting actress award for her role as Harding's mother. Margot Robbie received an Oscar nomination for Best Actress , while Tatiana S. Riegel was nominated for Best Editing .

action

The film initially claims to be based on "contradicting" but "true" interviews with former figure skater Tonya Harding and her ex-husband Jeff Gillooly, which makes it clear that these are unreliable narrators below . The film is framed by interviews with the characters in the style of a mockumentary , who are set in the present. The fourth wall is broken through repeatedly in the course of the film .

In flashbacks, Tonya tells of her chain-smoking and constantly drunk mother LaVona Golden, who constantly argued with her and even threw a knife at her once that got stuck in her arm. Her first boyfriend and future husband, Jeff Gillooly, has regular physical arguments, and after she breaks up with him, he even shoots her.

Tonya's husband, Jeff Gillooly, hires and pays an assassin to intimidate competitor Nancy Kerrigan . This injured Kerrigan with an iron bar in the knee, which as a result, the competition can not continue. Tonya wins the 1994 US championships, but the title is stripped from her after her links to the assassination become known. The investigations will not end until after the 1994 Winter Olympics, so Tonya Harding can enforce her participation in the 1994 Olympic Games against the opposition of the US NOK . She was given three years probation, 500 hours of community service, and a fine of $ 160,000. Tonya will also be banned for life from all figure skating championships.

Biographical background

After the "iron bar attack" on her arch-rival Nancy Kerrigan in the run-up to the 1994 Winter Olympics , Tonya Harding fell out of favor. Although Kerrigan was wounded in the attack by an attacker hired by Harding's ex-husband and her bodyguard, she was still able to participate in the subsequent competition. Harding, whose reputation and career were ruined after the incident, protested for many years that he had not known about the plans. Only after the film was released did she admit in an interview in January 2018 that she had heard of the plans: “It must have been a month or two beforehand. I knew something was going on. I heard them talk about it. ”Harding was convicted of obstructing the investigation and banned from championships for life, which amounted to a professional ban.

On her return from the Winter Olympics , Tonya Harding was already expected by the paparazzi

The images of Kerrigan screaming and being hit in the knee by an iron bar went around the world. While this was an elegant runner and was perceived as almost perfectly princess-like, Harding was proletarian and more athletic, dared the bigger jumps, but left a lot to be desired in terms of both restraint in appearance and taste in the selection of costumes, according to Barbara Schweizerhof in the Berliner Morning mail . Marlen Hobrack explains in Zeit Online that, unlike the witches in fairy tales, Harding, who is referred to as the “ice witch”, had a dark anti-glamor about her, and she was the ultimate bad girl: “You love to hate her. Because of this badly bleached eighties frizz hairstyle, strong thighs and unusually ugly costumes. No heroine looks like this to little girls! Kerrigan, on the other hand, was as sleek as a Teflon pan. ”Hobrack also remarks that the runner was far too little glamorous to be an ice princess, especially without a healthy, loving family behind her.

production

Staff, cast and dubbing

It was directed by Craig Gillespie and scripted by Steven Rogers . In 2016, it landed on the blacklist of Hollywood's best unfilmed ideas . Rogers had interviewed Tonya Harding and her ex-husband Jeff Gillooly in advance and was inspired by their contradicting statements, which is why he chose the style of a mockumentary in which the interviewees address the viewer directly.

Sebastian Stan at the premiere for the film in Toronto

Margot Robbie , who co-produced the film with her husband Tom Ackerley, screenwriter Steven Rogers and Bryan Unkeless, played the leading role of figure skater Tonya Harding in the film. About her experience with figure skating, Robbie said after moving to Los Angeles, she joined an ice hockey team even though she didn't really know how to skate. In his younger years Harding is played by Mckenna Grace . Sebastian Stan took on the role of her husband Jeff Gillooly, Allison Janney that of her mother LaVona Golden and Caitlin Carver the role of Nancy Kerrigan .

The German synchronization was based on a dialogue book and the dialogue direction by Heike Kospach on behalf of Christa Kistner Synchronproduktion GmbH, Potsdam. Julia Kaufmann lends her voice in the German dubbing Tonya Harding, Björn Schalla her husband Jeff and Ulrike Möckel her mother LaVona Golden. Matthias Deutelmoser speaks Al and Uwe Büschken Bob Rawlinson. David Letterman will be dubbed by Sven Brieger .

Film music, filming and film editing

The film music was composed by Peter Nashel . The film's soundtrack includes 16 pieces of music, including songs by Cliff Richard , Laura Branigan and Fleetwood Mac, and was released as a download on December 8, 2017 and should be released in physical form by Milan Records the following week.

Filming took place in Atlanta and Macon . Nicolas Karakatsanis acted as cameraman . The film editor Tatiana S. Riegel had already worked on a total of five films with the director Craig Gillespie for ten years. Riegel was nominated for an Oscar for her work on I, Tonya .

publication

The film premiered on September 8, 2017 at the Toronto International Film Festival . In October and November 2017 the film was shown as part of the official competition at the Festa del Cinema di Roma. The film was released in US cinemas on December 8, 2017 and in German cinemas on March 22, 2018. On March 22, 2020, the film was included in the Netflix program.

reception

Age rating

In the USA, the film received an R rating from the MPAA , which corresponds to a rating of 17 and over. In Germany the film is FSK 12 . The statement of reasons for approval states: “Harding's childhood and career are depicted in a complex variety of perspectives and styles, so that an ambivalent picture of the protagonist emerges. The film touches on topics such as identity development and violence, the pressure in competitive sports and the dynamics of media reporting. The high emotional intensity of some scenes and individual depictions of violence, sometimes linked to sexuality, can overwhelm children under the age of 12. Since these scenes are staged with restraint, even 12-year-olds are able to put them into context and process them. In addition, ironic breaks facilitate emotional distancing. Since violence is never portrayed as worthy of imitation, neither overexcitation nor disorientation is to be feared for this age group. "

Reviews and grossing results

Director Craig Gillespie at the premiere for the film in Sydney

The film has so far won over 90 percent of Rotten Tomatoes ' critics . On the part of the critics, voices had become loud who felt it was cynical that I, Tonya had chosen the perpetrator as the main character and not the victim.

Variety's Owen Gleiberman says one of the most piquant moments in the film was when Tonya Harding confessed during an interview that she was abused as a child and later by her husband, but ended up experiencing the ultimate abuse that comes from all of us. In the film, however, Harding returns as what she always was, according to Gleiberman, namely as a great skater and a person with a dream.

Nina Jerzy from the Neue Zürcher Zeitung describes I, Tonya more as a black comedy than an oppressive drama, as Gillespie and the film editor Tatiana S. Riegel stage the violence with built-in humorous catharsis. Men in particular are funny figures here and almost too stupid to be able to cause real damage, Jerzy continues. How much the makers fell in love with the supposed bizarre of the secondary characters becomes particularly clear with Tonya's mother, LaVona Golden, says Jerzy: “She could have emerged directly from a Wes Anderson film . Janney portrays the figure in a mangy fur coat with an oxygen tube in his nose and a parakeet on his shoulder as a kind of blofeld of the white underclass. “The film is funny, biting and with Robbie and Janney excellently cast, but Gillespie reveals Harding too often for a laugh and lose sight of the figure, especially in the second half, says Jerzy.

Hans Jürg Zinsli from the Tages-Anzeiger says that as a viewer you suddenly find yourself in a conflict about how to evaluate this figure: “Is she really the calculating ice witch that everyone thinks she is? Isn't she rather a fighter who rebels against her “white trash” environment ? ”But it is this ambivalence that lifts I, Tonya out of the mass of streamlined biographies, so Zinsli continues, whereby this ambivalence goes so far that one in the film should neither trust pictures nor words, and the film remains exciting because it does not answer some important questions in an adorable way.

Allison Janney plays Tonya Harding's mother LaVona Golden in the film

Knut Elstermann from MDR Kultur thinks that Harding automatically attracts our sympathies as the victim of a tyrannical mother, a beating husband and as a ridiculed lower class ice princess in a chic glittering world and that she receives an honor in this very entertaining, cinematic rescue that she never had . In addition, Allison Janney received an Oscar very rightly for this magnificent trash figure.

Martin Schwickert says in the General-Anzeiger that Margot Robbie is fabulous in the title role and that the actress is giving this supposedly trivial figure in sports history back her proletarian dignity without stylizing her as a tragic heroine. Nevertheless, the film does not look at its main character from the perspective of pity, whose complicity in the assassination remains unclear. According to Schwickert, the tone of the narrative remains comedic and analytical in that the various subjective, unreliable narratives combine to create a structure of extremely entertaining complexity, and despite the ironic approach the film never betrays its characters in terms of cheap cynicism.

Barbara Schweizerhof explains in the Berliner Morgenpost that I, Tonya, portray with painful accuracy and Margot Robbie in top form, how much abuse goes with growing up in the white trash milieu: "Tonya is already so much abused and beaten by her mother, that she takes the beating of her first husband almost habitually. While the acted out rudeness of the characters prevents the viewer from feeling too much compassion for them, the persistence to assert oneself in adverse circumstances also demands a lot of respect. Tonya Harding still seems ambivalent after the film - but it is much more difficult to condemn her. "

Marlen Hobrack explains in Zeit Online that from a feminist perspective the film is a tough nut to crack, one has to somehow show solidarity with Harding, who is constantly serving up crap and who is clearly a victim of domestic and systemic violence: “You really want solidarity but then not having to be with a woman who at least knew about plans to eliminate her competitor. Harding is not suitable as a recipient for solidarity addresses. I, Tonya not only offers a narrative that deals almost obscenely with the question of morality and guilt, but also puts a white trash girl at the center of the story, which turns the American dream into a real nightmare for everyone involved . "

In the USA, where the film was shown in four theaters from December 8, 2017, it grossed $ 264,155 on the first weekend (an average of $ 66,039). The film has worldwide revenues from theatrical screenings in excess of $ 45 million.

Awards (selection)

In December 2017, gave Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is known, that the film in the pre-selection is out of the nominees in the category Best Makeup and Best hairstyles of the Academy Awards 2018 were determined. Below is a selection of nominations and awards from other film awards.