The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2021)
dir. Michael Showalter
Rated: PG-13
image: ©2021 Searchlight Pictures
The radiant and talented actor Jessica Chastain probably saw a certain little gold statue in her future when she bought the rights in 2012 to Tammy Faye Bakker’s life story. There’s nothing the Academy loves more in a best performance category than an actor radically altering her or his appearance for a role: Robert De Niro as Jake La Motta in Raging Bull; Charlize Theron as serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster; Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf in The Hours. Oscar really loves it when beautiful people are perceived as uglying themselves up for a role.
Chastain certainly fits the bill with her performance as disgraced televangelist Bakker in the dramedy The Eyes of Tammy Faye. The phosphorescent makeup and wild hair styles that were Bakker’s trademarks make Chastain practically unrecognizable – especially in the latter parts of the film.
Unfortunately, that’s about all The Eyes of Tammy Faye has going for it. Chastain’s performance is a good one. You might think her Fargo-esque Minnesotan accent is too over the top, unless you’ve seen footage of the real Tammy Faye. As a reclamation project for Bakker – who passed away in 2007 at the age of 65 – Eyes is a moderate success. I left the movie a little less likely to laugh at Tammy Faye and a little more appreciative of her ethos of loving people for exactly who they are.
The rest of the movie is a pro forma biopic that’s sporadically entertaining, but ultimately bland and rather boring.
Written by Abe Sylvia, his biopic is based on a quirky (but also underwhelming) 2000 documentary of the same name. (Drag impresario RuPaul cements Tammy Faye’s LGBTQ+ bona fides by lending his narration to the documentary.) The Eyes of Tammy Faye tells the story of Tammy Faye LaValley meeting and falling in love with preacher Jim Bakker. The two marry and begin a ministry that grows to reach millions via cable on CBN, the Christian Broadcasting Network.
If you sat down and wrote out a handful of essential plot points for a cliché, stereotypical biopic, odds are Eyes of Tammy Faye would include most of what’s on your list. In an unimaginative, straightforward narrative, we see – in this exact order, with the exception of a bookend opening and closing scene – Jim and Tammy Faye’s meet cute; their financial struggles as they try to make their dream a reality; unbridled financial success; betrayal as that success corrupts them; repentance and redemption (at least for Tammy Faye).
Another recent biopic that aimed to rehabilitate a fallen figure of our not-too-distant past was 2017’s I, Tonya. That movie could have fallen into the same traps that ensnare The Eyes of Tammy Faye. The difference is that I, Tonya has a kickass and unapologetic perspective in its subject, Tonya Harding. That movie is punk rock, whereas Eyes of Tammy Faye is soft rock. No shame alone in elevator music – I’ll be the first one to turn up Christopher Cross’s Sailing, should one of my Pandora stations serve it up – but Eyes lacks a compelling hook or any surprises.
I’m sure Sylvia did some other research besides simply watching the documentary upon which his screenplay is based, but it doesn’t feel like it. I took a look at the doc directly after screening the fictionalized version, since I had never seen it. Almost every scene is translated to the biopic version. It feels like Sylvia made a list of every scene while watching Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato’s documentary and ticked off each one as he wrote his screenplay.
One plot element present in the new narrative version is Jim Bakker’s possible homosexual tendencies. There might be one fleeting reference to it in the documentary. The biopic tantalizingly teases what is, for Jim’s faith, an unforgivable transgression, only to completely ignore it after it’s served its immediate dramatic purpose.
The couple’s other sex scandal, involving Playboy Playmate Jessica Hahn, is similarly glossed over. The movie treats it as an affair that Jim paid Hahn in order to cover up, when in actuality, Hahn accused Bakker of rape. It’s possible the movie’s producers wanted to soft peddle these items, since Jim Bakker is alive and well. (Showing he has no concept of shame, Bakker is now back on TV as a Trump bootlicker and hawker of, among other scams, “miracle COVID cures.”)
It’s easy to hate Jim Bakker as an unscrupulous grifter – the movie never makes the connection explicit, but there’s an obvious evolution from the scams that brought Bakker down to the bottomless pit of corruption practiced by Donald Trump – but at least all he cared/cares about is money.
The Eyes of Tammy Faye shows the religious fanaticism and sickening thirst for power from other evangelical super-star contemporaries of the Bakker’s 1970s/80s heyday. Pat Robertson is shown as completely vainglorious. (Robertson is, you’ll remember, the ghoul who blamed a 2010 earthquake in Haiti on the Haitian people signing a “pact to the devil” to end their enslavement in the 18th century.)
Andrew Garfield is simultaneously slimy and child-like as Jim Bakker.
Vincent D'Onofrio turns in an arch and deliciously dour performance as Christian Supremacist Jerry Falwell. As the ultimate villain of the picture, Falwell stabs Jim in the back after the Jessica Hahn incident. (Falwell is the troglodyte who blamed the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America’s permissiveness of abortion and homosexuality.)
Then there’s Tammy Faye. Chastain makes the character endearing through her performance. A particularly poignant moment comes in the movie when Tammy Faye interviews an AIDS patient on one of her segments for The PTL Club (that’s Praise The Lord), Tammy Faye and Jim’s wildly popular televangelism show. It’s almost an exact recreation of the interview as seen in the documentary. Chastain allows us to see how moved Bakker was, inspiring her to reach out to the gay community, many members of which were suffering in the early years of the AIDS epidemic. They were treated with scorn by both their own government – Ronald Regan set the example right at the top – and evangelical Christian leadership.
It was most likely invented for the movie, but Jerry Falwell witnessing, backstage, the interview Bakker does on her show with Steven Pieters, an HIV-positive gay Christian minister, and storming out in disgust is delicious. Tammy Faye had a genuine compassion for suffering people, no matter who they were, and Chastain radiates the character’s empathy. When Tammy Faye insists that, “I just wanna love people,” in her comedic flat midwestern accent, we believe her.
At the same time, the movie never convinced me that Tammy Faye had no idea of the financial scams her husband was perpetrating in his thirst for wealth. Tammy Faye was no pushover, based on one scene in which she takes Falwell to task – who insists, upon their first meeting, in the most obnoxious way possible (“Let’s call me Reverend Falwell”) when Tammy Faye calls him “Jerry” – for not being as accepting as Christ was.
The movie gives her a pass when she – according to the movie – has no idea that her husband’s “name it and claim it” preaching style (which set the template for other “prosperity gospel” hucksters like Joel Osteen and Kenneth Copeland) was used to fleece their flock. The movie tries to have it both ways when Tammy Faye’s radical compassion overcomes any obstacle, yet she simply can’t see the rampant malfeasance happening right under her nose.
Michael Showalter’s direction for The Eyes of Tammy Faye is uninspired and bland, despite gorgeous production value in everything from costumes to recreating the 1960s-1980s time period. I enjoyed Showalter’s directing work on the 2017 comedy The Big Sick, and he co-wrote and co-starred in one of the best comedies of all time, Wet Hot American Summer.
“Why are we here?” is the overall effect of Showalter’s work on The Eyes of Tammy Faye. Each scene boarders on dramatically inert, and I was checking the time about halfway through, because nothing happening on screen was particularly compelling. (I was checking the time metaphorically, of course. I would never do such a thing in a movie theater; I’m not a philistine, people.)
I’d almost be willing to bet money that come awards season, Jessica Chastain will get that Oscar nomination for her transformation into Tammy Faye Bakker. She deserves it, although the suffering she endured for the performance might be overstated. The stories of her skin being ruined by the makeup for the role were, according to her, overblown. Chastain is immensely talented – you need look no further than her recent work with Oscar Isaac in the HBO remake of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage. It’s a shame that her excellent performance as Tammy Faye Bakker isn’t surrounded by a better movie.
Why it got 3 stars:
- There’s not much there there with The Eyes of Tammy Faye. It’s worth seeing for Chastain’s powerhouse performance, but the movie is lackluster at best. It suffers from being boring.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- The moment where Tammy Faye interviews the inventor of a penis pump is pretty great.
- The scene that gets closest to making us understand how harmful Jim Bakker was to Tammy Faye comes when she has to literally sing for their supper in front of the camera. He makes HER apologize for his affair, and he does it so people will send them more money.
- Two words, spoken in one amazing accent: “Sodah Pahp.”
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- This was Rae’s and my first trip back to Alamo Drafthouse since before the pandemic. A little Peaches & Herb is appropriate here. There were a handful of other people at the screening. Rae had a huge bowl of popcorn. It was bliss.