Mark Reviews Movies: THE EYES OF TAMMY FAYE (2021)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 23, 2021

Whether she went by Tammy Faye LaValley, Bakker, or Messner, the woman was always just "Tammy Faye." The Eyes of Tammy Faye mostly covers the Bakker years of the woman's life, when she was married to a Christian preacher who would become one of the most influential television evangelists. By the end of the couple's two-decade career on TV, he would be disgraced by his actions, and she would become a joke.

Tammy Faye was always crying, and nobody particularly cared why. After all, her husband was a crook, and she wore so much makeup that the darkened trail of mascara on her cheeks was a good enough punch line.

Director Michael Showalter's biographical movie of Tammy Faye Bakker, as she's known for the majority of this tale, desperately wants us to feel sympathy for a woman who, at one point, genuinely loved her husband, genuinely believed in the power and salvation of her idea of a divine presence, and, by the end, lost just about everything for which she cared. It wasn't her fault—the embezzlement and fraud and hush money paid to an alleged victim of sexual assault. She didn't know and, because she trusted her husband, couldn't have known.

All of this is superficially fascinating, in the way that tales of famous people who look perfect, only to have a bunch of dark secrets just beneath the surface, are. Showalter and screenwriter Abe Sylvia (working from a 2000 documentary of the same name) mostly focus on the surfaces in this story—whether it be that public perception, the growing rift between this couple, the political divide within the televangelist community, or the face of the main character, which becomes increasingly caked and layered with more and brighter makeup, a layer of fake tan, and tattooed lines for the outlines of her lips, eyes, and eyebrows.

Following a prologue of Tammy Faye's troubled childhood and embrace of Pentecostalism, Jessica Chastain plays the character from the ages of 18 to 52 or so, with the aid of some quite convincing makeup (that goes beyond the kind that the real Tammy Faye always wore). In 1960, while attending a Christian university, she meets and quickly falls for Jim Bakker (an amiably goofy—which might let the real man off too easily—Andrew Garfield, whose own aging makeup surely suffered from the attention on Chastain's transformation).

He's an ambitious wannabe preacher who believes ministers should gain material wealth for their devotion and ability to spread the faith. A funny sequence has the two groping each other and saying they have to stop because they're not married, only to cut to Tammy Faye introducing her mother Rachel (Cherry Jones) to Jim, her new husband.

The rest of the story breezes through the couple's personal and professional successes through the ensuing decades—before their big fall. After working for a Christian network run by Pat Robertson (Gabriel Olds) and being shoved into obscurity by the influence of Jerry Falwell (Vincent D'Onofrio), Jim starts his own network, with himself and Tammy Faye as the charismatic and welcoming hosts.

Jim has big and bigger plans—among them, a housing community for his flock and a Christian theme park. Tammy Faye enjoys the fame, her chance to record music, and all the material gains of the ministry. Only too late, after the marriage falls apart to his obsession with work and some infidelity, does Tammy Faye start to question from where all this money for Jim's schemes and her comfort is coming.

This, of course, makes for some showy drama, some fine performances, and the hints of a more thorough story, which involves corruption, hypocrisy, and one of the major problems with modern-day religion—mostly evangelical Christianity—that the Bakkers ushered on to television screens across the country and, indeed, around the world. Whether they're afraid of being too hard on the eponymous figure (or her still-living and still-grifting partner) or of being seen as attacking a broader religious community, the filmmakers stop short of trying to uncover what relevance the Bakkers' story possesses, beyond the fact that it does make for big, flashy drama.

Chastain, obviously, is the highlight here. While the character looks and sounds like a caricature or a clown (as even some people at the network joke)—which is unavoidable, given the actual person—throughout most of the movie, Chastain doesn't play her as either.

She gets the artifice—the Minnesota dialect, the Betty Boop pitch, that unique singing voice—right, but what's beneath the surface matters more. Throughout the performance, there's a sincerity of belief, passion, and even compassion, such as during Tammy Faye's famous interview with a man diagnosed with AIDS, in which she treated him without an ounce of judgment, for her particular audience and at a time of much uncertainty about the disease.

Sylvia and Showalter focus so much on what sets Tammy Faye apart from the likes of her husband and Falwell that the movie too often feels as if it's pulling its punches on targets demanding to be hit. The Eyes of Tammy Faye, then, makes for a generally engaging drama, as well as a showcase for its star, but one can't help but feel the movie could dig even just a little deeper.

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