The Eyes of Tammy Faye

Director: Michael Showalter
Starring: Jessica Chastain, Andrew Garfield, Cherry Jones, Vincent D'Onofrio, Mark Wystratch, Sam Jaeger, Louis Cancelmi, Gabriel Olds, Fredric Lehne, Jay Huguley, Grant Owens, Randy Havens
Running Time: 126 min.
Rating: PG-13

★★★ (out of ★★★★)

When Jessica Chastain won the Best Actress Oscar for 2021's The Eyes of Tammy Faye, her victory  elicited one of two reactions. Either that she was already owed statues for Zero Dark Thirty and The Tree of Life, or maybe more cynically, it extended the Academy's streak of awarding actors for playing a real life figure in a by-the-numbers biopic. And bonus points if it's an attractive star undergoing some kind of massive physical transformation like Charlize Theron in Monster. Michael Showalter's film (based on Fenton Bailey's 2000 documentary of the same name) proves that all these assumptions can be true at once, as the deservedly honored Chastain triumphs while buried under mountains of face paint and prosthetics as enigmatic televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker. 

For Academy voters known for crowning the most and biggest acting, the thought of Chastain tackling the disgraced Tammy Faye had to be a dream come true, even as audiences resisted. Without digging too deeply, the picture moves through key events at a breakneck pace that makes you wonder why it wasn't green lighted as a limited series in the vein of Hulu's The Dropout (of which Showalter directed episodes). But with more than a few tricks up his sleeve, this is as straight down the middle as a biopic can be in chronologically hitting its marks, with the leads physically and emotionally capturing two controversial figures in all their bluster, flamboyance, and superficiality. The last descriptor is  important in reconciling how one half of this couple comes off substantially more flawed than their partner, flying in the face of most of our preconceived notions about their story.  

It's 1960 when Tammy Faye LaValley (Chastain) meets Jim Bakker (Andrew Garfield) are both attending North Central Bible College in Minneapolis, Minnesota. To her mother Rachel's (Cherry Jones) disapproval, they drop out of college shortly thereafter to get married and begin preaching in Christian communities across the country. This catches the attention of televangelist Pat Robertson (Gabriel Olds) who hires them as hosts of their own children's show, "Jim and Tammy," on his Christian Broadcasting Network. But as Jim ascends to hosting CBN's "The 700 Club," Tammy clashes with conservative pastor Jerry Falwell (Vincent D'Onofrio) over her support of the gay community. 

Following the birth of their first child, the Bakkers go out on their own in 1974, creating the PTL Satellite Network, where they have free reign to control the programming content. As "The PTL Club" emerges as an enormously successful flagship show and ratings juggernaut, questions soon surface in the press about their finances and numerous allegations of abuse and extra marital affairs. With the empire they built from the ground up suddenly crumbling around them, Tammy takes refuge in prescription pills, fighting to save her reputation, career and marriage from the brink of irrelevancy. 

Depending on perspective, the film's either giving us a condensed, cliff's notes version of pivotal events in the trajectory of Tammy Faye and Jim's unraveling, or a tight, linear plot that hits all the important notes in an economical fashion. For much of the time it feels like the latter, as Showalter lets Chastain and Garfield loose, inhabiting young, likable idealistic dreamers who veer wildly off course when they conflate their desire to spread the good word with an insatiable appetite for money and fame. What's interesting about this is how Tammy really doesn't change or grow from when Jim meets her as this sweet, bubbly, Betty Boop-voiced innocent whose strict, overbearing mother would tell her little girl she's headed for hell. Tammy held on to this, but flipped it, vowing instead to spread love, kindness and compassion through her and Jim's ministry. 

National TV exposure is both the best and worst thing that happens to them, but mostly the latter, as Showalter does a strong job showing these two literally falling in love with the idea of themselves as celebrities. This leads to some of the film's best sequences, as the charismatic pair have audiences hanging on their every word, with Laura Fox's production design only further accentuating the garish 70's and 80's circus atmosphere of the programs. That the film's look reinforces the narrative's ideas is one of its many charms, even as we fasten our seat belts and await the big crash. Seamlessly merging actual footage with fictional scenes shot in the same throwback style, it's often difficult to tell where  fiction ends and reality begins for the couple. In studio scenes of their show's production carry almost an SNL spoof quality to them, such as a brief, but delightful recreation of a Colonel Sanders (Grant Owens) interview. 

That Tammy Faye remains who she is and always was makes her a worthier subject for study than the less complicated, more insincere and volatile Jim. She's portrayed as a guiding force who isn't without admirable qualities, which Chastain nicely balances with some of the louder aspects of Tammy's larger-than-life personality. Never the conformist, she stands up to Falwell, loudly rejecting the church's stance on homosexuality, believing that the exclusion of anyone flies in the face of everything they should stand for. This is prominently displayed in a sequence when she publicly supports a Christian pastor suffering from AIDS on the show, to Falwell's disgust. He'll eventually extract his revenge since Jim's immoral and illegal activities make him almost too easy a mark for the Baptist preacher.

Tammy's affair with music producer Gary Paxton (Mark Wystrach) is highlighted as the opening shot that demolishes the Bakker's careers and marriage, but unbeknownst to her, Jim's been behaving far worse and for much longer. It's his hubris that sinks the ship, and if Chastain's physical metamorphosis into Tammy has garnered much of the attention, there are points where it seems Garfield's wearing just as many layers of makeup and prosthetics as she is. But regardless of that, he gets Jim just right, turning on the charm with the warm, welcoming smile that never seems to leave his illuminated face, even when lying through his teeth. 

Though it's an odd comparison, the pacing, tone and style here is what we should have gotten from Marielle Heller's underwhelming 2019 Mr. Rogers biopic, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, which attempted to explore a far different TV personality. But that couldn't quite get inside the show's production the way this does, immersing modern viewers in what the experience of watching it would have been. Wrongly worried that Rogers wouldn't be exciting enough a protagonist for his own story, they put the focus on a depressed journalist instead. There's no such issue with Tammy Faye, whom Chastain dynamically plays with a great capacity for goodness that's misdirected and overridden by greed and poor judgment. That such a scandal would generate far fewer headlines in today's overcrowded news cycle of moral depravity might be the saddest indictment of all. Back then, the media was beginning to perfect their sensationalizing and Tammy's implosion was an early case study, setting the stage for the rest who would follow.

A post script at the film's end serves as a harsh, ironic reminder that Jim not only outlived Tammy, but somehow caused even more trouble in the years following his release from prison. But it's telling that she's the one still talked about well over a decade after her death, saying something for perseverance and survival instinct. She eventually chose more respectable avenues for expressing her love of singing and the church. moving away from controversy. Showalter gives Tammy kinder treatment than she probably deserves, but it isn't inaccurate, with Chastain circumventing the many facets of a woman who, for better or worse, lapped up her time in the spotlight.