Review of The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2021)

 Synopsis: Tammy Faye leaves her strict midwestern home with a traveling preacher and winds up starting a religious television show with puppets, and eventually builds the familiar empire that lead to their downfall, through marital woes, struggles with drug abuse, and an ever-present need for her stoic mother’s love. 

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I’m not sure if I was supposed to see Wet Hot American Summer before The Eyes of Tammy Faye, but I didn’t. Whatever pall that might cast over this sweeping expanse of the fall of the Bakker empire, I feel somehow Jessica Chastain absorbed and personally forgave Michael Showalter his sins. They stepped back from his farcical work, found it in the real Tammy Faye's mascara, and applied it thickly in this compelling biopic of one of America's most grotesque celebrities.

If there’s ever been a character portrayal who so utterly “gets” bathos, it’s Chastain’s. Maybe William H. Macy in “Fargo” or “Happiness”, but both are basically bad guys, and there’s no subtlety about knowing which side Macy’s characters are on. Chastain threads the needle like nothing else in recent memory. 

From an atheist’s perspective, I’ve been disgusted with the Bakkers since I’ve been aware of them, and I was disgusted with the constant apologetic tone towards Tammy Faye’s turning to “the lord” in the movie, and yet, by the end, I was completely absorbed in her motivation, the way Dexter or Nurse Betty made you side with them. Gripped. 

The schism between the Bakkers and the older, more conservative preachers (Falwell, Robertson), regardless of reality, irked the historian in me even more: Tammy Faye was in no way a feminist. Tammy Faye was in no way an AIDS activist. There was nothing redeeming about their political positioning, their simonizing (see Dante) and commodification of religion purely for profit. Ever. And yet, as the movie started, you could sense that was what the director was up to, and you were going to fight it, but by the end, you were practically singing “Glory Glory” with Chastain spinning me along, until the creepy ending, reminiscent of “Requiem for a Dream”.

There’s a lot of logic gaps: Why did nobody kick the mother out of church when Tammy went into spasms? Why didn’t Jim remove his ring in jail? Why was she even interviewed later on (Tammy’s Terrific Teens”), which further tries to absolve Bakker in her criminal enterprise? But again Chastain makes it so tense in the room, that I didn’t quite care. When you thinks she is going to feed the dog, maybe with her own mouth, she doesn’t. But I could hear a drum roll in my ears.  

Shout out to the goofy 80s font in the captioning, and shout out to costuming, make-up and D’nofrio as Falwell! (That “fat Baptist” Bakker says. Nice touch). I bet Philip Seymour Hoffman, summoning his performance in Doubt (2008), would have been a great Falwell. 

Sadly, in the end, Bakker’s cold-hearted mother (absolutely nailed by Cherry Jones) may have embodied the movie’s final message, and gives a complete pass to the real sicknesses in America: the PTL Club, the 700 Club, ORU, and Liberty University. 

And yet, for two blissful hours of Jessica Chastain and Andrew Garfield, I was a believer.