In her 30s, Harding turned to celebrity boxing to pay the bills, depicted in I, Tonya's gruesome final scene. . . . But even more wrenching is the only footage of the real Harding shown in the film, over the end credits: she's performing her 1991 nationals routine and, radiant, lands her historic triple axel. With this, I, Tonya seems to implicate the viewer in Harding's cultural abasement, rhetorically asking: It should've been about the skating, but you didn't really care about that, did you?
Leah Pickett
January 4, 2018