As Jessica Chastain soars in her portrayal of the titular televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, its screenplay struggles to keep up with the peaks and pits of her decades-long career.
★★★✰✰
When the world wants to scorn, it does so with a vengeance. Willing to run with whatever image it’s presented with, a global audience often asks few questions when providing judgement on what they claim to know. In the case of Tammy Faye Bakker, caricatures, comedy sketches and news items have solidified decades of hidden pain, blurring the lines between rumoured fiction and tattooed-on reality. With Jessica Chastain at the helm as its producer and leading star, The Eyes of Tammy Faye flies in the face of social boundaries, but skips over timely moments of meaty context.
As a young girl, Tammy Faye (Chastain) is taught that she’s a heathen, a harlet not welcome into the arms of God. After falling for the hearty preaching of Jim Bakker, Tammy makes it her life’s mission to serve God with open arms, willing to do whatever it takes to help the needs of another. Through puppetry, faux laughter and many albums of Christian pop, the Bakkers build the globally televised empire that becomes the backbone of their financial ruin.
Without analysing anything else in its narrative, Chastain’s portrayal of Tammy Faye Bakker herself is nothing other than exemplary, deeply rooted in its duty to convey her true selfless vulnerability. Continually latching onto the idea of a ‘greater good’, Tammy Faye flits between the labels of child and whore, unable to untangle fame and success from value and worth. The butt of life’s joke, she uses her God-given voice against the Christian boy’s club mentality, creating new meaning in interpretations of the Lord’s word. Bakker even foreshadows herself as a gay icon, reminding Christians of their true spiritual direction when choosing to interview an AIDS-stricken vicar in the height of the pandemic. Thanks to the make-up and hair departments, age transitions of Chastain over a 40-year period are impeccably slick, moving the emotional dial between indoctrinated child and forgotten trash television.
Moving past Chastain’s inevitable Oscar nomination, the rest of The Eyes of Tammy Faye is smashed together like two jumbled pieces of a jigsaw. Time transitions are sharp and staccato, marching forward to spend time drilling down into the details of financial embezzlement. While heavy focus on the Bakker’s downfall is greatly appreciated, the pacing of the overall narrative doesn’t feel even—the noticeable gaps between the years making frustrating viewing. The whole film feels structurally adrift as a result, and even when Tammy’s cagey inhabitation of a Nirvana-fuelled 90s makes for a compelling hook, the final half hour feels a little one note and nods towards questionable editing decisions.
While somewhat infuriating, there’s a lot that works. Andrew Garfield is suitably skeevy as the overarching Jim Bakker, despite potentially playing up to a facet of his acting chops we’re familiar with seeing (think Tick, Tick… Boom! without the singing). The directorial choice of hearing Tammy’s internal voice during prayer is an extremely satisfying draw, allowing us into the unguarded reality of Tammy Faye Bakker she’d never let see the light of day. Questions of vanity and the notion of pregnancy mitigating happiness intriguingly slot into the 126-minute runtime, delicately dancing around religion’s emphasis on a woman’s role in the Western home.
There is certainly a route taken to deconstruct the idea of missionary saviourism through The Eyes of Tammy Faye (quite literally). The overall lack of self-awareness piles pressure on the interpretations of faith and love, bargaining with God to lose a human soul along the way. Ideas of personal projection into image, faith and greed are ultimately what carry the film through to an overall satisfying climax, and saves the frustration from loopholes in the timeline of fraud.
The Verdict
With a narrative of true crime, high stakes and public persona destruction that should be an instant hit with any modern audience, The Eyes of Tammy Faye’s interpretation of global religious fraud in a woman’s framework just misses the mark. There’s a running theme of refusing to look reality in the eye that at times loses momentum, and the story looks to run before it can walk. As the true star she was always born to be, Chastain’s Tammy Faye keeps the ship steering in the right direction, cementing the idea she was always best off trusting her own judgement.
Words by Jasmine Valentine
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