I, Tonya and an Obituary I Left Out Nearly 14 Years Ago

Yesterday, when I left Walmart (and yeah, go ahead and slam me for buying stuff there), I came across a Redbox kiosk and noticed that the film, I, Tonya, was now out on DVD (and likely download and so forth).  I went and rented it.

It was a good film although there must have been 10,000 f-words sprinkled throughout the movie.  Tonya Harding and then-husband Jeff Gillooly might have used such endearments in their real lives, but there is no reason to take up half the film with the obscenities.  Otherwise, it was a good movie, with Allison Janney deserving her best supporting Oscar as Harding's estranged and strange mother, LaVona Fay ("Sandy") Golden.  While Australian actress (and a producer of the film) Margot Robbie did well in the part of the beleaguered and disgraced former skating champion, she looked nothing like the real Harding.  She appeared to be way too tall for the part.  There was not one hint of an accent, which shows me how well some performers can hide their nationality (Robbie has a noticeable Aussie accent in interviews).

The movie basically is  what is known as a "mockumentary" using Citzen Kane-type flashbacks from "interviews" of Harding, her mother, her ex-husband, and those involved in the assault on Harding's skating rival Nancy Kerrigan back in 1994.  Harding, the real one, has always denied any direct involvement in the assault.  I am not going pass judgment on this case because then, as now, the details surrounding the events leading up to the assault have always been murky.  I personally kind of doubt she had much involvement in it because she had little to gain from it.  As it turned out, it completely destroyed her skating career--and she was one hell of a skater being the first American woman to complete a triple axel in formal competition--and it completely altered her life.   Born in 1970 and growing up in Portland, Oregon,  Harding mostly lived the rest of her life to date in relative obscurity, remarrying and raising a son in Washington state, and holding down a variety of (often male-dominated) jobs until this movie came out.

Not that her life up to that point was much to brag about.  Harding and her mother, as documented in the film, had a strained relationship.  No doubt the mother, Sandy, was a hard worker, working as many as three jobs to help her daughter become a professional athlete.  She sacrificed and sacrificed, and she never let Harding forget it.  She was one of those mothers who lived vicariously through her daughter, but she constantly belittled and verbally abused her.  She even physically abused her from time to time.  I can relate because I had a verbally abusive mother who was not the extreme of Harding's mother, but she was damaging nonetheless.  I could see why Harding felt so beaten down all her life and why she seemingly had a "hard," don't-give-a-shit demeanor.  Moreover, Harding in the film and in real life would now be called "gender non-conforming" because she liked a lot of so-called male things like hunting and fishing, auto mechanics, welding, and so on down the line.  She wasn't a typical "feminine" woman, and because she wasn't, she wasn't considered the "ideal" skating icon for the judges and other skating bigwigs.  Nancy Kerrigan, on the other hand, was more the ideal and appealed to the bigwigs. 

There was also some humor in the film if one could get past all the obscenities.  No doubt many people, especially younger viewers, went to YouTube to listen to some of the songs on the soundtrack, which were gleaned from the 1970s and 1980s, not the golden age of popular music, but there were some good songs during that time that were the perfect examples of songs that stick in your head for the rest of your life.  I was no exception.  I had heard all the songs on the soundtrack before, but I had to look them up on YouTube.  I eventually downloaded two of them for my iPod Classic, which is still going strong ten years after I bought it:  Supertramp's "Goodbye Stranger," a big hit for the band back in 1979; and "Gloria," a massive, massive, massive hit for singer Laura Branigan back in 1982 and a song that came at the end of the disco era or was even past it. 

And then something truly embarrassing occurred to me.  I have noted so many obituaries over the 15 years (can it really be THAT long) I have had this blog under various names and layouts. Occasionally I have been known to not know someone had died until months later (famed jockey Johnny Longden) or that I thought I had forgotten but in fact didn't forget at all (singer Desmond Dekker), but the case of Laura Branigan has got to be about the most egregious of all not just on my part but on the part of the media.  I had completely overlooked her untimely death in 2004 of an aneurysm she suffered in her sleep after having complained of headaches for a number of weeks.  She never got any medical attention for it.  Branigan had been more low profile in her later years.    Her husband of eighteen years had suffered from cancer, and he died of the disease in around 1996.  She had left show business to care for him and then returned to the stage and eventually to recording.  She was working on an album at the time of her death.  She never remarried.  Anyway, I had completely overlooked her death when it was made public all those years ago.  I decided to make it right today and give her some much needed attention. 

However, I wasn't the only person who screwed up with the late singer.  The entire media fouled up, too, when they couldn't even get her age right.  She was widely reported at the time of her death to be a mere 47 years old.  Now this screw-up would normally would be corrected a day or two after the death announcement.  Not with poor Laura, however.  It wasn't until twelve years later    after some people notified Associated Press there were some errors in her original obituaries.  The media didn't get her age right, or where she grew up:

When the pop singer Laura Branigan died, The Associated Press, relying on information from her management company, reported in an obituary on Aug. 28, 2004, that she was 47 and had been born on July 3, 1957.

After being contacted recently by one of Branigan’s fans, however, the AP conducted a thorough review and established that she had actually been 52 when she died. School records, newspaper articles written about her in the 1950s and 1960s, and testimonials from childhood friends all indicate she was born in 1952.

She is also best described as having grown up in Armonk, not Brewster, as the AP’s original obituary said.

Better late than never.

As for the movie, I give it three-and-a-half stars out of five.