I’m loving being immersed in award season contenders, and The Eyes of Tammy Faye is up next!
The Eyes of Tammy Faye follows Tammy Faye Grover (Jessica Chastain) and Jim Bakker (Andrew Garfield) as they soar to become perhaps the biggest televangelists that have ever been. Tammy and Jim bond over a shared perspective that God cannot be overly offended by vanity, as he did give us The Promised Land to enjoy after all, and the Bible has never been so sexy! As a child, Tammy’s family had a strange arrangement where she was the only one who was forbidden to go to church, and as she sneaks into church one day, she has a deeply religious experience, that forms a foundation in which she believes her purpose is spreading the word of God. Through puppets, singing, and out and out charisma, Tammy and Jim create the PTL (Praise the Lord) television network, and grow preposterously big, preaching that everyone is loved by God, and worthy of love by everyone. The Eyes of Tammy Faye is brought to us by Michael Showalter, from Abe Sylvia’s adaptation of a documentary by the same name.
Eventually, as the true story goes, PTL starts to unravel in debt, but after completing this movie, I still have no clue if Jim was bad with money, or deliberately bad with money. PTL gained thousands in charitable donations from their audience, creating outreach programs just as quickly, so I could see that Jim fell in with the devilish temptation of ‘credit’, building too fast too big, and that he just didn’t have the financial skills to manage it properly. Because isn’t that what some financial gurus tell you to do; invest all your capital forwards and hope the house of cards doesn’t topple on your way upwards? Jeez, it could be that my confusion with this movie’s stakes comes down to my poor understanding of business. Yet, selling partnerships in a theme park, and then using that money elsewhere, like buying the silence of a lady after regrettable nookie, is an obvious no-no – the only confirmed illegal money trail that the movie actively shows us. Similarly, the same case can be said for Jim’s alleged homosexual tendencies; there’s circumstantial evidence, but no concrete proof, with the movie seemingly decidedly silent one way of the other.
These days, biopics usually pick a concise theme to revolve around, where The Eyes of Tammy Faye seems to be simply content with replicating events as they happened. I guess the through-line for this movie is Tammy’s faith in Jim, winding him up to achieve his potential, and then having him spin erratically out of control, jeopardising their future – just like House of Gucci in that respect. But it’s not enough; the sensationalism of their achievement, and resulting failure, is not enough to make this movie irrefutably enticing. The movie choses to serve Tammy Faye, her perspective and her life’s journey along the rollercoaster of her marriage to Jim, but having seen what the movie dishes up, I think back on movies like The Wolf of Wall Street and I, Tonya, that don’t shy away from their nefarious and corrupt outcomes, and I wonder if this all could have worked better from Jim’s point of view, as we see the missteps he takes along the way. Because deliberate or not, it’s Jim’s sordid affairs that end up landing him in jail, and they work as a blind spot for this movie, suggesting either Tammy never got to the bottom of what was actually happening with her channel, or that there wasn’t much to see. I imagine Tammy Faye, as a supporting character, could have blown the barn doors off too, as a shining light in a decidedly corrupt organisation – like Walk the Line‘s June Carter, caught up in Johnny Cash’s self-absorbed sins. This movie may have aligned itself with the wrong inspiration. If this movie was a journalistic piece, I’d suggest it needs another go over to figure out it’s best angle.
Yet, The Eyes of Tammy Faye still also reminded me of A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood, because I think this movie is wanting to sell Tammy Faye as an inspirational and important person of America’s recent past. Tammy Faye seemed like a wildly charming woman; passionate in doing good for all peoples of the world, with God’s love on her tail. You can’t fault the movie for communicating that; I’d cheers a Diet Coke to it! Just for Tammy interviewing that gay man suffering from AIDS on her Christian network in the ‘90s, she deserves our respect; that scene, along with the moment where she plonks herself down on the men’s table at her boss’s BBQ pool party to talk shop, make for the best scenes, and I respect her disposition. Duly, it’s hard not to love Jessica Chastain with this performance too – if you’re coming to The Eyes of Tammy Faye to see what Chastain will do, you won’t be disappointed.
Moreover, if you want a great ballbuster, casting Cherry Jones is a good bet, and I really enjoyed her contribution to this movie, as Tammy’s mother, Rachel – she’s cold, and keeps her daughter at arm’s length, but is still caring, and it inadvertently gives Tammy a rock to struggle against from an early age. Andrew Garfield’s Jim is portrayed as a bit of a softie; Garfield is fine, but it just made me appreciate his year, with tick, tick… Boom! and Spider-Man: No Way Home, and think on how not every role can provide that plum ball to hit out of the park; two out of three ain’t bad though, for an Amazing Spider-Man! Vincent D’ Onofrio as Jerry Falwell is basically doing a brooding shakedown as a devout Baptist, and keeping the comic book theme going, I think the ending is most fun if you think of it as the Kingpin taking over 😀 But Susie Moppet, the little piggy puppet, is the best supporting character of the movie, c’mon.
Lastly, I just want to touch on the movie’s decision to use make-up for our actors to play all stages of our character’s lives. I found it interesting, coming off The Lost Daughter where I may have wondered if it was necessary to have two faces for our main character (using Olivia Coleman and Jesse Buckley), when there couldn’t have been much more than 20 years between the character’s adult depictions. Some of these scenes are unrealistic because of the aging, and you have to suspend your disbelief a little further than usual. For examples like, Jessica Chastain spanning Tammy’s life from a teen to pensioner, I suppose it’s less of a chance the movie has to take on multiple actors, who may vary too greatly in quality or interpretation, capturing the same character. But it also might be too much heavy lifting on the part of the chosen actor, having to cover so many age ranges emotionally, and make it feel realistic. In my conclusion, I guess there’s no right decision to make, but it is a decision that each movie like this has to make individually. Here, Chastain does not look young enough to be believable as the teenage version of Tammy Faye, but she ages up very well, while Andrew Garfield is clearly never really an old man.
2.5
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