I, Tonya: Harding Redeemed

By Pamela Zoslov

Actress Margot Robbie can be forgiven for not having heard of Tonya Harding, the champion figure skater implicated in a violent attack on Olympic rival Nancy Kerrigan in 1994. Robbie was born in 1990, and in Queensland, Australia at that.

Still, Ms. Robbie is a fine Tonya Harding in the black comedy I, Tonya, which uses a zesty mock-documentary format to tell the story of the talented athlete who achieved infamy in a scheme involving her ex-husband, Jeff Gilooly, a bodyguard, Shawn Eckhardt, hired assailants, and her lust for glory.

Directed by Craig Gillespie (Lars and the Real Girl) from a script by Steven Rogers (Hope Floats, Stepmom), I, Tonya sizzles with energy and irony. Tongue planted firmly in cheek, the film tells viewers it's based on “totally true interviews” with the principals of the notorious case: Tonya, her acerbic mother, LaVona (Alison Janney), Gillooly (Sebastian Stan), dimwitted bodyguard Eckhardt (Paul Walter Hauser), and a producer for “Hard Copy” (Bobby Cannavale), the TV tabloid show that, along with media everywhere, made bank off the Harding story. “There is no such thing as truth,” the movie's Tonya asserts in a low, raspy voice. “There is no such thing as truth. Everyone has their own truth.” And everyone has their say in this rinkside Rashomon.

 

Alison Janney as rinkside stage mom from hell.

LaVona tells her hard-luck story of raising the headstrong Tonya, who began skating at age 3 in their hometown of Portland, Oregon. “I guess we spoiled her,” she says, a claim belied by scenes of her verbally and physically abusing her daughter, the product of one of LaVona's several marriages. At 5, Tonya already had the burning desire to become a professional skater, and LaVona, dangling her omnipresent brown More cigarette, takes her to an ice rink and forces Coach Diane Rawlinson (Julianne Nicholson) to accept her, despite Diane's objections that she doesn't train beginners. (Young Tonya is played by Mckenna Grace.)

There's a class system at work in the girls' figure skating world. While Tonya is preternaturally talented, her athleticism and working-class background are handicaps in competition. She's made to feel unworthy in the sport, which requires girls to be ladylike and wear perfect little costumes and furs. (Tonya, who's been coached by her dad in rabbit hunting, tries to fit in by stitching together a homemade fur coat.) Throughout the movie, as her actions become ever more reprehensible, Mom LaVona laments that she sacrificed all for Tonya's career. Her meanness, she claims, pushed Tonya to greater heights, insisting in the present day, “She skated better when enraged.” In the interviews, LaVona is hooked up to portable oxygen, with a cockatoo perched on her shoulder, a nicely absurd touch. In real life, an epilogue tells us, Harding and her mother have been estranged for many years.

As Tonya's skating career takes off, she drops out of high school and marries Gillooly, the first boy she ever dated. He's crazy about her, but also violently abusive; in the “interviews,” Giloolly disputes Tonya's account of his brutality, but what we see is horrific. For Tonya, it's a continuation of her life with LaVona. Giloolly reflects on his infamy, and how, after the attack on Kerrigan, his funny-sounding surname “became a verb —” to “Gillooly someone” (to hit them violently in the knee with a baseball bat).

With a parade of tacky late-'80s hair and clothing styles, thrilling skating sequences that highlight Harding's astonishing skill (she was brilliant at the very challenging triple axel), and a soundtrack of '80s rock music both good and awful, the movie has exciting energy and a wry tone befitting the trashy saga.



The script relies on Harding's version of events, which mostly absolves her of guilt in the 1994 attack on Kerrigan. A brief summary: On January 6, 1994, after a practice session at the 1994 U.S. Figure Skating Championships in Detroit, a man named Shane Stant attacked Kerrigan with a telescopic baton, bruising her leg. It quickly emerged that Stant had been hired by Gillooly and Eckhardt to attack Kerrigan and prevent her from competing at the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer. Harding went on to win the national championship, and Kerrigan and Harding both were selected for the Olympics team. Harding finished eighth, and Kerrigan, recovered from her injury, won the silver medal.

As Harding tells it, she knew nothing about the planned attack, and was told only of a plan to send threatening letters to Kerrigan; the movie's account blames the escalation on Eckhardt. Wherever the blame lies, the fallout doomed Harding's career; she was banned for life from the sport, and was reduced to professional women's wrestling and other lowly activities. (The film doesn't mention her celebrity sex tape or her band, the Golden Blades, which got booed off the stage during its lone performance.)

Considering how badly Harding was treated by the media, which demonized and ridiculed her (she was a favorite late-night talk show punchline), the film's generous point of view is refreshing. As Tonya says in the movie, what is "truth" anyway?

We Will Fight Them: Darkest Hour

By Pamela Zoslov

Darkest Hour chronicles the period following Winston Churchill's unlikely accession to UK Prime Minister in 1940 and his famous “We shall fight” radio address, a mere 48 hours later, stating that England would never compromise with or surrender to Hitler. The film was scripted by Anthony McCarten (who also wrote The Theory of Everything), for whom this episode in British history is a personal passion. The screenplay is adapted from a book McCarten wrote on the subject.

Gary Oldman, who is nearly as protean as Lon Chaney, is the umpteenth actor to portray “The British Bulldog.” Encased in masses of jowly makeup, Oldman persuasively affects Churchill's personality and mannerisms, or at least the way those are remembered through the unreliable prism of history. All that is recognizably Oldman are his eyes, which seem younger, and probably less bleary, than those of the prodigious drinker Churchill. (His daily alcohol intake was reportedly white wine with breakfast, champagne and brandy with lunch, two or three glasses of whiskey and soda in the afternoon, champagne and brandy with dinner, followed by more whiskey and soda.)

Pamela Zoslov's Favorite Movies of 2017

We bid farewell now to 2017, that most terrible, awful, Trump-cursed year. Good riddance, bad year! As always, the movie theater proved a good escape from the frenzied chaos, and the year brought us some excellent films, and not too many terrible ones.

My list of favorites includes two titles starting with "I," the first-person pronoun, and not one of this year's four movies with the word “Wonder” in the title. I did, however, like cinematography and Kate Winslet's performance in Woody Allen's Wonder Wheel. I didn't see everything this year, God knows, and have not seen some scheduled to be released soon, like The Post, All the Money in the World, Molly's Game and Phantom Thread.

The top movie on my list, Martin McDonagh's Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, is currently playing in theaters, and is getting the nominations and recognition it deserves. McDonagh, the Irish playwright whose infrequent movies have included the coruscating In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths, has had a popular breakthrough with Three Billboards, in which Frances McDormand plays a woman determined to get justice for her murdered daughter.

Brad's Status

Review by Pamela Zoslov

We hate it when our friends become successful – Morrissey

What is it about dads that makes people cry? Regret about words unsaid to a dad now dead, issues unresolved, or just the general poignancy of the role of fathers, who are expected to be strong but not domineering, caring but not soft, and whose approval or disapproval can launch a child into a lifetime of success or a spiral of despair?

Recently on “Fresh Air,” the long-running interview program on NPR, host Terry Gross brought filmmaker Mike White to tears about his father. Granted, that is not unusual for Gross, whose pop-Freudian probing is designed to make her subjects weepy. White was talking about his love and gratitude for his father, Rev. Dr. Mel White, to whom Mike's new film, BRAD'S STATUS, is dedicated. About the film, White said, “I wanted to write something to tell my father I love him and think he is a success, even though he feels like he never lived up to his expectations for himself.”

Repost: Menashe (opens September 1st at the Nightlight Cinema)

[MENASHE opens in Akron on Friday September 1st exclusively at The Nightlight Cinema.]

Review by Pamela Zoslov

Joshua Weinstein didn't have an easy time making his movie MENASHE. The filmmaker drew his cast of nonprofessional actors from members of the Hasidic Jewish community in Borough Park, Brooklyn. Many had never even seen a movie before. Some signed on and then dropped out, fearing the disapproval of their synagogues and their children's schools.

Weinstein doesn't speak Yiddish, the language in which the film was made, so he had an on-set translator who read the lines to him in English. He stood far away from the actors, directing them through earpieces, in order not to attract attention in the cloistered enclave, which takes a skeptical view of modernity. Financing came sporadically, and the movie took nearly two years to complete.

Whose Streets? (opens September 1st at The Capitol Theatre and The Nightlight Cinema)

[WHOSE STREETS? opens on Friday September 1st at The Capitol Theatre in Cleveland, and at The Nightlight Cinema in Akron.]

Review by Pamela Zoslov

It's been three years since Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old, was shot to death by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, after being stopped for walking in the middle of the street and reportedly raising his hands in surrender. Brown's body was left to lie in the streets for hours. “It was a lynching,” said Brown's mother, Lesley McFadden. “My son was laying in the streets four and a half hours.”

The incident, one of more than 1,000 police killings that year in the U.S., became a flashpoint for protest and activism. WHOSE STREETS?, a documentary by Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis, focuses on the aftermath of the Brown killing. Davis, a St. Louis artist, was filming the street protests and was joined by Folayan, a journalist who turned to film because she felt the news media wasn't accurately capturing the experience on the streets.

The Only Living Boy in New York

Review by Pamela Zoslov

Simon and Garfunkel are having a pretty good year, with two movies named after their decades-old songs  “Baby Driver” and “The Only Living Boy in New York,” a tune that was a thinly veiled message from Paul Simon to Art Garfunkel, who had flown to Mexico to film Catch-22 (“Tom, get your plane right on time/I know your part'll go fine”). The erstwhile pop duo may actually hold a record for songs used in movie soundtracks.

The “boy” in THE ONLY LIVING BOY IN NEW YORK is Thomas Webb (Callum Turner), a recent college graduate and aspiring novelist. He lives in a squalid flat on the Lower East Side, in rebellion against his rich parents' upper Manhattan lifestyle. He is beset by young-man woes: his father, Ethan (Pierce Brosnan), an influential book publisher, is pressuring him to get his career on track; his mother, Judith (Cynthia Nixon) is depressed and dependent on pills and cigarettes; and his pretty love interest, Mimi (Kiersey Clemons), has consigned him to the dreaded “friend zone.” What's a boy to do?

Menashe (opens August 18th at the Cedar Lee Theatre)

[MENASHE opens in Cleveland on Friday August 18th exclusively at the Cedar Lee Theatre.]

Review by Pamela Zoslov

Joshua Weinstein didn't have an easy time making his movie MENASHE. The filmmaker drew his cast of nonprofessional actors from members of the Hasidic Jewish community in Borough Park, Brooklyn. Many had never even seen a movie before. Some signed on and then dropped out, fearing the disapproval of their synagogues and their children's schools.

Weinstein doesn't speak Yiddish, the language in which the film was made, so he had an on-set translator who read the lines to him in English. He stood far away from the actors, directing them through earpieces, in order not to attract attention in the cloistered enclave, which takes a skeptical view of modernity. Financing came sporadically, and the movie took nearly two years to complete.

Landline (opens August 4th at the Cedar Lee Theatre)

[LANDLINE opens in Cleveland on Friday August 4th exclusively at the Cedar Lee Theatre.]

Review by Pamela Zoslov

Gillian Robespierre's new comedy, LANDLINE, has many traits in common with her debut feature, OBVIOUS CHILD, which got a lot of attention due to its abortion story line. Both films focus on the romantic/sexual misadventures of a young woman played by comedienne Jenny Slate, and are sprinkled with copious amounts of scatological humor alongside some funny and affecting moments.

LANDLINE gets its title from its setting, 1995 New York, where the characters inhabit a world of obsolescent technology: boomboxes, manual rowing machines, dot matrix printers, and the eponymous corded phones. It is primarily a family comedy — not for families, given its crude language, but about the family of Dana (Slate), a young woman who is engaged to marry Ben (Jay Duplass), whom she has come to see as boring, sitting up in bed as he does, raving about items in the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog. Dana finds herself attracted to an old college friend, Nate (Finn Wittrock), and ends up sleeping with him, putting her wedding plans in jeopardy. She leaves Ben for a time to move back in with her parents.

Maudie (opens Friday July 21st at the Cedar Lee Theatre)

[MAUDIE opens in Cleveland on Friday July 21st at the Cedar Lee Theatre.]

Review by Pamela Zoslov

The difference between Art and Life is that Art is more bearable.

— Charles Bukowski

"A World Without Shadows” is the title of a stage play and short film about Maud Lewis, a celebrated Canadian folk artist who lived most of her life in a tiny, primitive house in Nova Scotia, covering every surface of the home with vibrant flowers, birds, and butterflies and painting whimsical cats in tulip fields, carriages carrying brightly dressed people, seagulls soaring over seascapes. Bent-backed and increasingly crippled by rheumatoid arthritis, the diminutive self-taught artist sold her paintings for five dollars apiece to locals and tourists who stopped by the house she shared with her husband, Everett. The couple are described in the documentary as having a “childlike, tremendous feeling; no shadows at all. Everything is happy and gay and quick and lively.”

The Beguiled

Review by Pamela Zoslov

Beguiling is not quite the right word to describe THE BEGUILED, the new Civil War-set film directed by Sofia Coppola. Slender, diaphanous, insubstantial — those might be more descriptive of Coppola's adaptation of a 1966 novel by Cleveland-based novelist Thomas Cullinan, a onetime writer for Cleveland's Plain Dealer newspaper.

Originally titled A Painted Devil, Cullinan's book is a Southern Gothic about a wounded Union soldier sheltered by the headmistress and students of a Virginia girls' school, where his presence creates sexual tension and violence. The book was adapted for a 1971 movie starring Clint Eastwood, Geraldine Page and Elizabeth Hartman. Coppola's film, which stars Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst, Elle Fanning, and Colin Farrell as the hapless Yankee, is the feminine rejoinder to the 1971 film, directed by Don Siegel of DIRTY HARRY fame.

Beatriz at Dinner (opens June 23rd at the Cedar Lee Theatre)

[BEATRIZ AT DINNER opens in Cleveland Friday June 23rd exclusively at the Cedar Lee Theatre.]

Review by Pamela Zoslov

The dinner party has long been a reliable setting for a comedy of manners or nightmarish descent into hell. BEATRIZ AT DINNER falls somewhere in between, with Salma Hayek as the titular Beatriz, a massage therapist who is the accidental guest at an elite soirée hosted by her wealthy clients.

The film was written by Mike White, a writer, director and sometime actor, and directed by his frequent collaborator Miguel Arteta. It's an unusual chamber piece that touches on corporate greed, animal rights, immigration, social inequality and spirituality. While not entirely satisfying as a linear narrative, it's beautifully filmed, thoughtfully written, and well acted.

My Cousin Rachel

Review by Pamela Zoslov

“Alive with all the impassioned suspense, dramatic fervor and excitement of the best seller by Daphne du Maurier, author of Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel comes to the screen with the only star in the world who could play it, Olivia de Havilland!” So intones the trailer for the 1952 movie, also starring Richard Burton in his Hollywood debut. “Was she woman or witch? Madonna or murderess?”

Though that movie received some good reviews and an Oscar nomination for Burton, du Maurier was unhappy with the adaptation of her 1951 novel. She particularly disliked de Havilland's looks and hairstyle, which she thought resembled the dowdy Duchess of Windsor, Wallis Simpson. Du Maurier might have found the darkly pretty Rachel Weisz, who plays Rachel in Roger Michell's new film adaptation, closer to the mark. (By the way, did you know Olivia de Havilland is still alive, and 100 years old?)

I, Daniel Blake (opens June 9th at the Cedar Lee Theatre)

[I, DANIEL BLAKE opens in Cleveland on Friday June 9th exclusively at the Cedar Lee Theatre.]

Review by Pamela Zoslov

Daniel Blake, a 59-year-old carpenter in Newcastle in northeast England, has had a major heart attack, and his doctor has advised him not to return to work. “I nearly fell off the scaffolding,” he tells the Jobcentre worker performing an assessment of his “work capability.”

Daniel's nightmare descent into Kafkaesque government bureaucracy begins when an unseen official referred to as “The Decisionmaker” disagrees with his doctor and denies him support benefits. Daniel wants to appeal the decision, but is also required to look for work, processes made more difficult by his health problem and the fact that he's not computer literate.

The Lovers

Review by Pamela Zoslov

THE LOVERS, a romantic comedy featuring the return to the screen of the elusive Debra Winger, reminds me of the adultery-themed farces that were, for some reason, so prevalent in the 1960s, like A GUIDE FOR THE MARRIED MAN (1967), which had practiced philanderer Robert Morse instructing Walter Matthau on the best techniques for cheating on his wife.

In The Lovers, a middle-aged couple, Michael and Mary (Tracy Letts and Ms. Winger), both have lovers on the side. Michael, who works a cubicle job for a land surveying company, is involved with Lucy (Melora Walters), a dancer who is pressuring him to leave his wife. Mary's lover is the much younger Robert (Aiden Gillen), a poet, who is also demanding that Mary end the marriage. Michael and Mary, who have a college-age son, have become just roommates, exchanging a few perfunctory words ("We're out of toothpaste") in passing, on the way to or from their respective liaisons. Neither suspects the other is having an affair, but you get the impression neither would be terribly upset about it.

Norman (now playing at the Cedar Lee Theatre and the Capitol Theatre)

Review by Pamela Zoslov

A recent celebrity quote I liked is from Richard Gere, the actor whose outspoken political views — protesting China's occupation of Tibet on the Oscars red carpet, angering China and jeopardizing the overseas movie market — have sidelined him from the majors and led him to take roles in independent films. “I'm not interested in playing the wizened Jedi in your tentpole,” the 67-year-old actor told the Hollwood Reporter. “I was successful enough in the last three decades that I can afford to do these [smaller films] now.”

The former leading man, now 67, appears in two small indies opening this month: THE DINNER, in which he plays a congressman involved in a scandal, and NORMAN, in the titular role of a political fixer, or what my Yiddish-speaking mother would call a “macher,” a guy who knows everyone, trades favors and exploits connections.

The Wall (opens in Cleveland May 12th)

Review by Pamela Zoslov

The best news about THE WALL, from Amazon Studios, is that it is not about President Trump's pet barrier against “bad hombres” from Mexico. It also has nothing whatever to do with Pink Floyd. It is instead a one-set thriller about an American army sharpshooter trapped behind a wall, threatened and taunted by an unseen Iraqi sniper.

The film's prologue and opening scenes suggest a rah-rah military "band of brothers" drama. The story, written by first-timer Dwain Worrell, is set in 2007, when, the prologue tells us, “The Iraq war is winding down, [and] President Bush has declared victory.” Mission accomplished! Two Army snipers, Sgt. Isaac (played with creditable Americanness by English actor Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Sgt. Matthews (Jon Cena) are conducting a counter-sniper mission after some contractors have been killed while constructing a pipeline. The sergeants' parched 22-hour desert vigil is punctuated by profanity (“My balls have melted into one fuckin' ball!”) and bitter disparagement of “hajis” (the American military slur for Middle Eastern people, who have the nerve to live in a country the U.S. has invaded).

Repost: A Separation (May 13th and 14th at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[A SEPARATION screens Saturday May 13th at 5:00 pm and Sunday May 14th at 6:30 pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]


Review by Pamela Zoslov

The point shouldn't need to be made that all people share the same fundamental experiences – struggles, sorrows, pleasures, joys. But we live in a world saturated by propaganda, much of it devoted to demonizing other countries to ease the path to war. Iran, one of the world's oldest civilizations, has since 1979 been characterized as irrational and aggressive, and now stands in in the cross-hairs for a probable military attack.


The powerful Iranian drama A SEPARATION, written and directed by the talented Asghar Farhadi, provides a welcome human counterbalance to the disinformation campaign. The film, whose Persian title translates to Nader and Simin, A Separation, has won numerous awards and is an Academy Award nominee in the foreign-language and original screenplay categories.

Repost: Inside Llewyn Davis (April 8th at the CWRU Film Society Strosacker Auditorium)

[INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS screens Saturday April 8th at 7:00 pm and 9:00 pm at the CWRU Film Society Strosacker Auditorium.]

Review by Pamela Zoslov

“The film doesn't really have a plot. That concerned us at one point; that's why we threw the cat in.”

That's what Joel Coen, one-half of the Coen brothers, has said about their latest offering, INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS. It's the kind of dismissive statement we've come to expect in Coen Land, where deep analysis is considered laughable. In 2001, I wrote in a profile of Ethan Coen:

With the Coens, it’s easy to fall into the trap of overanalysis. They long ago confessed their infatuation with the novels of James M. Cain and Dashiell Hammett, but Ethan says critics overestimate their literary influences. 'They read too much into it,” he says. 'We’re presumably these movie brats. They mention movies that we’re supposed to be influenced by, which we haven’t seen.' No doubt that’s because the Coens’ movies revisit and reinterpret a wide range of popular film styles. 'To be fair, we seem to invite that kind of exegesis, especially with Barton Fink. But you do stuff because it feels good for the story. There’s no code.

Wilson

By Pamela Zoslov

Dan Clowes' Wilson is the kind of character that has long excited the imaginations of novelists, indie filmmakers and cartoonists like Clowes: a misanthropic loser who nonetheless feels superior to everyone else, and who spouts his cynical existential philosophy everywhere he goes. The type appeared in examples as diverse as John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, in the mumblecore movie GREENBERG, and in the American Splendor of Cleveland's Harvey Pekar.

Wilson first appeared in an illustrated book (Clowes hates the term “graphic novel”) in 2010 consisting of one-page stories starring the bespectacled (like the artist), balding (ditto) Wilson, a well-read, aimless son of a college professor who finds himself alone after his father dies and his only friends move away. The book elliptically tells the story of how Wilson finds his ex-wife, Pippi, and learns that she gave up their baby daughter for adoption. Suddenly hungry for familial connection, Wilson insists that Pippi accompany him on a journey to reconnect with the teenage daughter he didn't know he had, who's being raised in the suburbs by a wealthy family.