[Rating: Rock Fist Way Down]
Now playing in limited release; opening wide September 24.
When a person meets their maker (whatever form that might take), the hope is that the good overshadows the bad: that a life lived to maturity finds the benefits of that existence to have outweighed the harm. In one of the grossest examples of reputation rehabilitation in cinematic history, The Eyes of Tammy Faye makes a posthumous case for its eponymous subject, arguing that cutesy mid-west values and bare-minimum humanity outweigh spiritual and financial fraud. It’s appalling, really, and frustrating to boot, as the film showcases the best performances of its leads’ careers, utterly wasting them on what could kindly be regarded as branded image propaganda.
Based on the 2000 documentary of the same name, The Eyes of Tammy Faye maintains a biographical footing throughout most of the picture, offering a glimpse of the fully formed Tammy Faye (Jessica Chastain) in 1994 before jumping back to her childhood in 1952. An enthusiastic Christian from an early age, Tammy later meets and falls for classmate Jim Bakker (Andrew Garfield) at the North Central Bible College in Minneapolis, starting a ministry with him shortly after. And while the young couple have plenty of enthusiasm and earnest intentions about bringing the word of Christ to families via their travelling puppet show, the Bakkers have trouble sustaining their work.
All this changes when Jim and Tammy are offered a spot on the show of televangelist Pat Robertson (Gabriel Olds), where the pair are an instant hit. If spreading the word of God and living comfortably were enough, the Bakkers would have stopped climbing here and been little more than a footnote in evangelical circles, yet The Eyes of Tammy Faye makes it painfully clear that wealth, fame, and status drive the couple. A true partnership, Tammy is shown encouraging and goading Jim on throughout the movie, positing that their success (which by the early-80s was undeniably meteoric) was as much a credit to Tammy as the more business-involved Jim.
Yet as director Michael Showalter moves his film towards the “bad” years, when the opulent lifestyle of the Bakkers is revealed to be the product of fraud and rank hypocrisy, this sense of partnership evaporates. Tammy, once a key driver of the ministry’s success, is excluded from the film’s critical gaze when Jim is rightfully brought to his knees in the third act: as if the fact that Tammy is poor and unpopular at the end is enough comeuppance. What’s more, The Eyes of Tammy Faye never takes its named subject to task for working in concert with a spiritually devious huckster who sold salvation to the gullible masses, nor does it ever address the very real history of Tammy verbally attacking the sexual assault survivor whose claims ultimately brought the couple down.
At times, the film flirts with genuine introspection, showing Jim and Tammy to be greedy from the jump, viewing their faith in transactional terms. When giving his sermon at bible college or lamenting his inability to pay the bills, Jim talks about God’s rewards for faithful obedience and service, couching his ministry in terms that makes the Almighty seem like less of a deity and more of a bookie or mob boss. It’s an interesting seed that gives some context to what the couple will become once it flowers, yet Tammy (and the film) never examines this fatal flaw in spiritual logic, and like Jim’s bisexuality, or the Bakkers’ role in the radicalization of Christian politics, it is just sort of thrown into the stew of the movie without any follow up.
It begs the question of just what this movie is trying to say, for as it is, The Eyes of Tammy Faye seems like a sympathetic portrayal of a rural Minnesota gal who fell in with a bad fella, went through some tough times, but came out okay on the other side. It certainly isn’t a critical examination of a woman who promised salvation for a price and helped radicalize a religious majority into a regressive political bloc. Indeed, the film introduces Jerry Falwell (Vincent D’Onofrio) as a character in the story to emphasize the growing political clout of their increasingly hardline televangelist sect, yet like everything else that isn’t favorable to Tammy, any related culpability for something problematic just kind of rolls off her. Although Tammy has a few scenes where she vocally defends the humanity of the LGBTQA+ community, and shocks Jim and Falwell with her T.V. interview with an AIDS patient, this showcase of Christianity’s bare minimum is hardly enough to support what this ultimately is: a sympathetic bio pic of an extremely problematic person.
Which is a shame for the cast, because there’s some phenomenal work being done, here. Garfield’s usually outsized physical presence and swagger is tamped down as Jim Bakker, whose gaudy brand of Christianity is wrapped in plastic smiles and stiff deliveries in this telling. Garfield is usually such a magnetic presence on-screen that his ability to close himself off and only gradually build up to the charismatic television personality that he would become is a study in controlled restraint. Yet it’s Chastain who runs away with the picture as Tammy Faye, and draws on a mixture of self-assurance, innate amiability, and a desperate need to please to reassemble the real woman on-screen.
It’s just a pity that the performance comes in such an objectively awful film, which mistakes a linear retelling of Jim and Tammy’s story for an engaging narrative. A slow first act that weirdly leans into the desperate horniness of the Bakkers in their early years surrenders precious screen time that would have been better served exploring the inner struggle (if indeed there was any) of a woman who dedicated herself to Christ while conning her fellow man out of millions. There’s an interesting story in there, to be sure, yet The Eyes of Tammy Faye never comes close to finding it, wasting a career-best performance from Chastain on a film that should play well with the handful of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker fans left in the world, but few else aside.
“Obvious Child” is the debut novel of Warren Cantrell, a film and music critic based out of Seattle, Washington. Mr. Cantrell has covered the Sundance and Seattle International Film Festivals, and provides regular dispatches for Scene-Stealers and The Playlist. Warren holds a B.A. and M.A. in History, and his hobbies include bourbon drinking, novel writing, and full-contact kickboxing.
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