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
Not more than 24 hours later, Guy Ritchie’s role offer to Markle has now reportedly been withdrawn. The story goes that they don’t want her in the show anymore “after intense backlash in the U.K.”