What's about real life self-inflicted tragedy stories that warrant a relook? There is nothing inspirational that can be gleaned from there. At best, they serve as cautionary tales. But then again, it doesn't need a movie to hone in on common sense truths like crime doesn't pay and would always meets its commeuppance, there is no such thing as a perfect crime, ill-gotten gains seldom last long et al. It only appears to cater to the gawker's tendecies in people who slowly drive past a scene of the accident craning their necks to the fullest to catch a glimpse of the wreckage with a morbid curiosity. During the last year of the ill-fated and much reviled presidency, the controversial filmmaker Oliver Stone announced to make a movie about George W. Bush, to compound to an already rock bottom ratings that the President was polling at that time. It was indeed a suprise announcement, for, most of the biographies (print or film) usually let time be an effective partner and history be the ultimate judge in viewing one's career. It took a long time to look past the eccentricities and excesses of Lyndon B. Johnson to finally recognize him as the worthy friend in office of the civil rights movement. Despite all the missteps and misadventures that Bush undertook during his presidency, chief among them is the now never ending war on terror, it still was too close to judge the person and the personality that soon without the usual advantage of time and distance. Given Stone's penchant to not let facts come in way of telling a good story, the project was already nixed by the conservatives as another propoganda tool and baulked at by the liberals as too reactionary (if not incendiary). But "W." was neither. It was neither polemic nor propaganda. When Stone dug into the details and analyzed his subject, he found a tragic figure, one who, in his own words, called himself a "black sheep" in the family, one who could not hold on to a job, struggled with alchoholism, had immense pressure to live up to his family name, and one, by a stroke of dumb luck, found himself riding the wave of dignity and discipline (of all things) that he vowed to restore to the highest office (post the Lewsinsky scandal) all the way the White House. Like all tragic stories, it was just wrong place at the wrong time, except, the place was the most influential seat in the world and the time, the most dangerous of all in the modern times. So here was an uninformed, not so bright, never eager to learn, and cocky President who was always stage managed, easily influenced and strong armed by his coterie into fulfilling a dangerous agenda that he understood the least. What Stone set out to do and what he finally ended up with were polar opposites, all because he could not make a monster out of a flawed, tragic human being. And that probably is the purpose of revisiting these tragic stories, that the audience develop an empathy for these characters that life has not looked upon kindly, for any number of reasons.
The mere mention of the name Tonya Harding would bring up revile and ridicule from self-appointed arbirters of morality down to late night TV hosts, for she came across as a person lacking any sophistication, to put it mildly, in a sport that is all about grace and poise. For well over a decade, during the 90s, she was the butt of all jokes, satirized on sitcoms, headlined in the Top 10 lists, offered money to be punched and beaten to pulp in boxing rings (which she accepted), and even pushed into a life of porn (which she regretted). That she came from a broken family, lacked any formal education, brought up by an abusive and a cruel mother (whose constant berating and putting her daughter down belong in the Comedy Roasts Hall of Fame), married young to escape her life of hell at her house, and as fate would have it, to an abusive husband (whose physical abuse nicely complemented the verbal and psychological mind games played by her mother), all this while she held the one thing that she loved the most, figure skating, so much so that she almost became an Olympic medalist, if fate had not intervened with her plans..... And she was 23, when her career (and with it, any chance of a better life) was over.... 23 .... "I, Tonya" is a story about broken dreams and shattered hopes of a person who, despite all mitigating circumstances that she found herself in for no fault of her own, almost climbed to the pinnacle of the sport, and in one error of judgement found herself come crashing down from the top bruised, broken and beaten, much like in her unforgiving sport. The movie is dominated by tour de force perfomances of Margot Robbie (as Tonya) and Allison Janney (as her mother) who go head to head, matching abuse to counter-abuse, trading insults and barbs, like their real life counterparts, apparently. The smart script doesn't take one side over the other and makes it clear upfront that none of narrators (Tonya, her mother, her husband, his friend and the sleazy media representative) is a reliable and trustworthy one, and that the actual truth lied more in the contradictions of each other. Even the tone of the movie is more tongue in cheek moving from disbelief to farce to comedy to tragedy seamlessly and gracefully like those captivating figure skaters in those ice rinks. The overall style and tenor of "I, Tonya" resembles Gus Van Sant's "To Die For" (a satirical tragi-comedy about small town ambitions) and the fantastic TV series "Fargo" (about bumbling idiots caught up in high crime), but tops them with great performances. Breaking the fourth wall at will, the movie refuses to be tied down to pre-determined formats, causing it to a documentary, a first person narrative, a biography and an unreliable commentary (a la "Rashomon"). Probably, that's what a tragedy is too, a conspiracy of events beyond one's control all closing in at the same time.
checkout http://kanchib.blogspot.com for Srinivas's Blog.
