The Eyes of Tammy Faye
Not to make this all about me, but I met and briefly hung out with the real Tammy Faye Bakker, and she cannot be duplicated. It was 2000, and gay television-moguls-in-training Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato (Rupaul’s Drag Race) had become pals with the former televangelist and had produced and directed an eye-opening, revelatory, and thoroughly entertaining documentary about her and her crooked husband, Jim Bakker. (That film, alas, is out of print and not available on any streaming platform.)
Titled The Eyes of Tammy Faye, their doc debuted at that year’s Sundance Film Festival, which I was attending, and Fenton and Randy invited me over to the ski lodge they were renting to interview them and Tammy Faye. It was a trip and a half, as they say, as Tammy Faye plied me with food and drink, asked about my husband, and answered every question in long, heartfelt, not always coherent monologues. She was a never-still dynamo not much bigger than a hobbit, and she wanted everyone to know how much she cared about — well, everything and everybody.
In the new biopic, also called The Eyes of Tammy Faye, Jessica Chastain is considerably larger than a hobbit, but otherwise she does admirable work conjuring Tammy Faye (who died in 2007 after a brutal battle with cancer). Similarly well cast — who would have thought? — is ex-Spider-Man Andrew Garfield as Jim Bakker, a slippery, self-centered man whose ambition knows no bounds but who isn’t too good with the details (like paying for things). For those who missed the documentary and recall only snippets of the scandals and the makeup and the jokey T-shirts, this Eyes takes viewers through the whole cringe-worthy story, from preaching with puppets to the Biblical-based Heritage USA theme park to the empire’s ignominious collapse.
Therein lies the film’s strength and its weakness. With strong lead performances and a hit-the-highlights screenplay by TV writer Abe Sylvia (Nurse Jackie), the movie succeeds in retelling the Bakker saga one more time from Tammy Faye’s point of view — partly ambivalent and partly oblivious. She is the mistress of exaggeration, from her makeup to her home decor to her expressions of sympathy. Her live video interview with a gay man with AIDS on Christian television rightfully characterizes everything that’s both right and wrong with her outlook on life: She wants to hug everyone, but she also wants to envelop herself in luxury — at some distance from the harsher world outside.
The film surrounding the central couple is competent biopic fare, directed by Michael Showalter, whose strength remains personality-centered comedies (The Big Sick, The Lovebirds). Showalter doesn’t seem to have a strong point of view on his story, and he relies on his actors to connect the dots. Sylvia’s dialogue holds up from scene to scene, but nothing quite adds up to a bigger picture. In the second half, an antagonist emerges with the arrival of Jerry Falwell (Vincent D’Onofrio), but a great opportunity to contrast the pious, pompous, unassailable Falwell with the uncertain, dandified, corrupt Bakker is mostly left undeveloped. Bakker’s alleged homosexual encounters are also underplayed, likely to forestall the equation of being gay with being weak and deceitful.
Again, there’s much here that’s captivating and worthwhile, particularly the portrait of Tammy Faye as a wife who refused to be just a subservient helpmate. But after this film and Respect, it’s time to call once again for a moratorium on strictly chronological biopics of complicated celebrities. Insisting on presenting every reel highlight, in order (with selective but minimal flashbacks), shackles filmmakers with a relentless “this-then-this-then-this” pacing and little time to stop and really glimpse anyone’s inner life. In contrast, a film like One Night in Miami or Selma, which settles for a good long time on one brief period, lets historical figures come more fully to life. Some of the best parts of Jackie, for example, were the flashes-forward to Mrs. Kennedy’s one-on-one interview with a journalist, providing a baseline reading of her mind set and manners that reflected that richness back on everything else portrayed in the film.
While I wouldn’t consider myself to be anywhere near the journalist Theodore H. White was (not fit to lick his boots, you say? I won’t disagree), watching The Eyes of Tammy Faye, I kept recalling that ski slope villa in Utah and the life Tammy Faye briefly constructed for herself as a wanna-be gay icon, as a penitent and mother to all the hurting people in the world. Could there have been some anchor moment in this narrative feature that let us see Tammy Faye at length and in close proximity for more than a few dramatic flourishes at a time? And are you sure you don’t want something to eat, honey?
Grade: B. Rated PG-13. Opens October 1 at the Fine Arts Theatre in downtown Asheville. Join Asheville Movie Guys for a hosted screening of the film on Monday, October 11.
(Photo: Searchlight Pictures, © 2021 20th Century Studios)
