Chris's weekly look at movie music takes on Tonya Harding's arena rock...
I, Tonya has proven to be one of Oscar season’s most love it or hate it films - and naturally for yours truly, defending the film is a lot like defending its somewhat maligned soundtrack. And I fall on the slightly positive side for both. Like many of the film’s other broad strokes, it doesn’t nearly all work and some play for a quick grab at audience allegiance. Yet by my ear, its greatest musical sin is underserving Hot Chocolate’s “Every 1’s A Winner” (but we can leave that to Greta and Noah).
While the film becomes too contradictory to support its acceptance of the slippery boundaries of fact, personal truth, and conflicting perspectives, the way it uses music to examine this relationship is a bit more elegant...
The primary complaint is the endless barrage of rock anthems cranked to eleven, and indeed this is one musically LOUD movie. However for those of us who grew up in the kind of white trash surroundings like the dingy Portland depicted in the film, that sound cuts almost too close to life. Its music is one of the most authentic aspects of a film that otherwise purposefully plays as only fleetingly authentic. If some of the tracks are a part of the movie’s cheap drag, particularly with tacked-on moments like Supertramp’s “Goodbye Stranger”, in their explicitness they play to the other side of the film’s divide between fact and delusion.
It’s not just the verbal barbs and glasses shattering against a wall, the film brings to life a world that sounds like Bad Company and Dire Straits. Even if the needle drops draw attention to themselves unnecessarily, their brashness does plunge us into its profane and toxic world. One where the pull of a cheesy love song helps you relent to the false love story you’ve been promised or a power ballad can pump up the sense of self-worth relentlessly torn down by your surroundings. It’s the sound of lower class dreams built by nuclear unit promises and deferred by harsher realities.
The quick dismissal of I, Tonya’s song choices also reflect the same complaints lodged against the athlete herself, which is exaggerated for the film. Tonya’s use of heavy metal is a point of contention for both her biased judges and her dotingly measured coach, but moreso a tool to present Tonya as a rulebreaker to an audience who may not fully appreciate her story or the internal cultural nuance of the sport. In the rushing (and crunchily digitally modified) camerawork and thumping beat of ZZ Top’s “Sleeping Bag”, Margot Robbie’s Tonya becomes an expressive hero on screen. The Tonya presented isn’t merely an enfante terrible, she’s a provocative, unique artist in her element.
Though no, Tonya Harding did not skate to ZZ Top for the particular competition the film depicts, though she did on other skates. But here the film continues to musically embody the film’s swaying distinction between fact and truth - it boldly projects how Harding rejected the image expected of her and presents the badass superhero vision of herself that existed in her head.
But to also give us a different sense of the high-stakes arena Tonya existed in, both on the ice and off, perhaps some rock and roll is exactly what was needed. The thunderous tracks reveal the size of her inflated sense of humanity, and yes, her messy humanity.
And this is all tonally opposite from what Sufjan Stevens had created for Harding, but I’ll save talk of that artist for next week’s look at Call Me By Your Name.
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