Lionizing Lies at the Movies
“I, Tonya” and “The Disaster Artist” are entertaining but struggle with truth.
Every year in awards season, screeners come pouring in, leading a lot of folks in the entertainment industry to dust off DVD players that have been in storage since last awards season to watch films that none of us would have bothered to spend actual money on at the multiplex, and decide which ones are the best films of the year. I’m not a voter, myself, but I’m the beneficiary of voter colleagues who like to watch screeners with friends, so each year I join them in watching those award-hopeful movies that I hope won’t make me want to jump off a bridge. This year among the screener pile were I, Tonya and The Disaster Artist, both of which have received the much-vaunted Golden Tomato.
While both of these films are entertaining, and I, Tonya features a very good performance from Allison Janney (I was less enthralled with Robbie’s performance than most who’ve seen the film), I came away from each utterly perplexed at the idea that they are in sniffing-distance of any awards and vaguely annoyed at the seeming lack of any sense of obligation on the part of the filmmakers to the easily available, well-documented truths underpinning each.
Both have been treated as well-done plucky underdog stories, albeit with not entirely likable underdogs. Both have an odd air of condescension; a pat on the head of the viewers and a soft cluck of the filmmakers’ tongues accompanied by a cinematic whisper of “poor simple dears, that’s really the best you can hope for, isn’t it?” while telling stories of not-terribly-interesting incompetents and not-very-good liars. Both have been taken, by many critics, at face value, which seems to be a big — and growing — problem among professional critics, who are the persons best placed to point out glaring differences between a film’s version of truth and actual, fact-based truth.
Stripped down to the basics, these are sometimes engaging films telling the story of banal incidents that got a whole lot of attention — a ham-handed assault on Nancy Kerrigan by Tonya Harding’s cronies and the making of terrible, awful independent film — and attempt to make these events more universally meaningful than they are, while at the same time pretending there are no ethical conundrums raised by the way the filmmakers focused their stories.
Films “inspired by actual events” or “based on a true story” always play fast and loose with facts and character because, usually, the facts are stultifyingly undramatic, and the characters aren’t the kind who pop off a movie screen and make themselves real to an audience. Real people tend not to do that; characters do. So the facts and the characters are altered, but the film retains the truth revealed by the documented facts inspiring the story. These two films go further: one of them, I, Tonya, abolishes the truth revealed by core and proven facts in favor of turning a wrongdoer into a victim and thus denies the existence of objective truth, and the other, The Disaster Artist, discloses facts that tell us more truth than the movie is willing to acknowledge in its portrayal of Tommy Wiseau.
It’s understandable that the Harding-Kerrigan story caught all of our attention back in the 1990s: Olympics; Keystone crooks; ice princess v. auto mechanic on skates as the ideal reality protagonist and antagonist all made for a tv-ready tale. I, Tonya tells a version of this story wherein there is no real truth, just self-righteousness and self-justification while everyone lies through their teeth (perhaps, and perhaps not, believing those lies). Problem: there were facts. And there was truth. Lots of both. Multiple members of the press and the prosecution team have come out against the film’s retelling of the planning of the assault and its portrayal of Harding as not intimately involved with a plot that at one point included discussion of murdering Kerrigan (The Oregonian has been particularly good at covering the reaction of sportswriters and prosecutors involved in the actual Harding case to the film, with J.E. Vader’s article of particular merit). While the film doesn’t outright grant Harding redemption, it does show, over-and-over, Harding as victim, and Janney, in a recent acceptance speech, declared Harding “a woman who was not embraced for her individuality.” I’m not sure how much embracing a woman who pleaded guilty to hindering prosecution in a plea-bargrain arrangement and recently, on ABC’s 20/20, admitted to knowing more than she had previously acknowledged before the crime against Kerrigan was committed should get, but I suppose that’s neither here nor there when you want to give a real rah-rah ‘I feel the pain of the disenfranchised’ acceptance speech about a film that glosses over facts that lead to a demonstrable truth with the thoroughness of a Zamboni.
Next, we have The Disaster Artist, which, while funny, aspires also to be heartwarming. So it tells you to chase your dreams of fame and fortune even if you are an unlikable creep who stinks at those things you dream about, lies about your background, and are completely shady about how you came into your vast fortune. Mike Rowe was pilloried a few years ago for telling people not to follow their passion, for saying “just because you’re passionate about something doesn’t mean you won’t suck at it.” The Disaster Artist applauds, over and over, someone who sucks at his passion AND who seems to be a bit of a monster to boot. But Tommy Wiseau, as portrayed by James Franco, never gets his comeuppance for being a lying, clingy, manipulative, delusional, passive-aggressive, possibly sexually harassing jerk. Instead he is treated as an oddball example of someone who followed his passion. And sucked at it, to quote Mike Rowe, but that’s OK, because it all worked out for him in the end. Sure, there are moments when people yell at the character and threaten to walk off the film, but, ultimately, it’s all sloughed off as just a part of Tommy; there’s never a moment where you feel the film is saying to the audience, “hey, you should realize that this is a bad person with a dangerously delusional side as well as an ego that could put Donald Trump to shame.” No, instead, Tommy triumphs both with and over his crappy film, and the text over the end credits tells us that to this day nobody knows when or where Wiseau was born (False. Poland, 1955) or how he made his money (True. Which is probably something SOMEBODY should look into).
Perhaps I am making too much of this. Neither film has been nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars, and the outpouring of praise seems to have passed — in the case of The Disaster Artist, with a perhaps-dubious assist from the #metoo movement. But something the Hollywood Reporter’s annual “brutally honest Oscar voter” said yesterday about the main characters of The Disaster Artist seems apropos here about both of these films, their fundamental disinterest in the truth of the individuals they are lionizing, and their ability to hang around in awards season:
“…these guys wasted people’s time and got famous because of it.”
Yes. The same could be said for Tonya Harding. And now, thanks to these films, these mildly interesting incompetents and crooks have wasted our time, not once, but twice. When it comes to award-nominated stories, can’t we do better?
Next Up: Dare to be Cheesy
