ReelBob: ‘The Eyes of Tammy Faye’ ★★★
By Bob Bloom
The tone of, “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” is erratic. It jumps between satire, parody and drama like a barefoot beachgoer on a sizzling August day.
The movie chronicles the rise and fall of televangelist Jim Bakker and his wife, Tammy Faye, concentrating mostly on her story.
The key problem is the movie, based on a 2000 documentary of the same name, can’t decide whether it wants to treat Tammy Faye as an object of ridicule or portray her as a sympathetic personality who was unaware of all the financial improprieties at her and her husband’s PTL empire, which included a television network, theme park and housing development, among other enterprises.
From the outset, the film portrays Jim Bakker as a huckster who sees the Bible, not as a road to salvation but as a highway to the nearest bank.
The always-optimistic Tammy Faye, who is head-over-heels in love with her husband, follows him blindly, never asking questions about where the money is coming from.
Director Michael Showalter fails to create a definitive attitude about Tammy Faye. And it doesn’t help that Jessica Chastain as Tammy Faye falls into Showalter’s conception of the character. At times, you see the intelligence and awareness in Tammy Faye’s eyes and face about what is going on around her. But her upbeat and positive attitude obstruct her from believing anything bad about Jim.
The one constant running through the movie is Tammy Faye’s love and compassion for all people — including homosexuals. One telling sequence of her interviewing a gay minister who has AIDS encapsulates her acceptance of people whom others in the televangelism community are shunning and denouncing.
In some moments, “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” is too strong on its comedic elements. Too many “Praise God!,” “Thank you, Jesus” and “Amen” almost make it seem we’ve stumbled into the middle of a “Saturday Night Live” sketch.
But then Showalter rights the ship.
Chastain is the moral center of the movie, as the story is mostly seen from her perspective.
Her Tamny Faye embraces God as a child to compensate for the love she does not get at home. Her mother, Rachel, is a cold and dour woman who has remarried. She has forbidden her daughter to attend church with the rest of the family because she is a reminder that Rachel is a divorcee.
Tammy Faye meets Jim at a Minnesota Bible college and is immediately attracted to his positive and upbeat interpretation of Scripture, which leads to their success and eventual downfall.
As Jim Bakker, Andrew Garfield is one-dimensional. He always seems to have an insincere smile and pious comment, justifying the riches he and Tammy Faye are accumulating as tokens of love from their followers.
Garfield rarely allows us to see behind Bakker’s cheerful façade.
Showalter falls back on the cliched use of montage to show the Bakkers’ rise in the televangelism world. The sequences use fast cuts of hands answering phones at the PTL studio to accept donations that lead to the increasing number of material possessions filling the Bakkers’ lavish mansion.
Cherry Jones as Rachel, Tammy Faye’s mother, is the movie’s voice of reason. She continually scolds her daughter for her blindness toward Jim, asking her over and over, where is the money coming from? From the outset, Rachel sees Jim for what he is — a biblical conman.
Still, despite some drawbacks “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” is a solid biopic. But, like Tammy Faye’s heavy layers of makeup, Showalter cannot totally give us a complete picture of the woman behind the mask.
I am a founding member of the Indiana Film Journalists Association. I review movies, 4K UHD, Blu-rays and DVDs for ReelBob (ReelBob.com), The Film Yap and other print and online publications. I can be reached by email at bobbloomjc@gmail.com. You also can follow me on Twitter @ReelBobBloom and on Facebook at ReelBob.com or the Indiana Film Journalists Association. My movie reviews also can be found at Rotten Tomatoes: www.rottentomatoes.com.
THE EYES OF TAMMY FAYE
3 stars out of 4
PG-13, sexual content, drug use