The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2021)

 Score: 4.5 / 5

Other than Milk and The Walk, I'm not sure how many other feature films are made as adaptations of documentary films. This one is a biopic of its titular character, the famed televangelist and evangelical celebrity Tammy Faye Messner, mostly during her early years in the biz as Tammy Faye Bakker. The film chronicles her youthful energy and courtship with Jim Bakker before launching us into the highlights of their stardom. We witness their founding of the PTL Club and their work towards a Christian entertainment empire, complete with a theme park. But as they are slowly corrupted by the wealth around them, their relationship fractures and their life work begins to crumble. As the good book says, the love of money.

The Eyes of Tammy Faye is aptly named, because despite the many narrative choices the film makes -- and could have made -- director Michael Showalter (Hello, My Name is Doris, The Big Sick, The Lovebirds) and, to a lesser extent, screenwriter Abe Sylvia, keep everything tight on its protagonist. Despite the film's narrative hang-ups and what I expect will be a staunch confusion by some as to why this story needed to be told again, once it got rolling, Chastain's performance more than makes up for any doubts I had. Her chameleonic performance, helped by stunning makeup and hair destined for awards nominations, feels ripped from my memories of seeing PTL Club crap on tv as a kid. More than once I had to look closer at the screen to see if the film was using stock footage or if it was really Chastain peering out from those gaudy lashes. Vocally, she performs in a completely different register, which must have been the result of some brutal vocal coaching and strenuous care routines; the only comparison I can make to it is that of Gillian Anderson in the National Theatre Live production of A Streetcar Named Desire. If she isn't nominated for an Oscar, it'll be a crime.

Speaking of which, Andrew Garfield plays her fraudster husband Jim Bakker with remarkably sturdy support. It is never easy to perform opposite someone so spectacular -- and I do mean, partly, someone who plays a spectacle -- but, like Hugh Grant in Florence Foster Jenkins, Garfield holds his own and sometimes steals focus as the soft-spoken, round-chinned father of capitalist televangelism. The film repeatedly suggests his indiscretions and crimes, but largely combines them into an amalgamated sense of fraud: fraud in business, fraud in love, fraud in faith. His moral bankruptcy and brilliant portrayal of, essentially, a flaccid firebrand, makes him a sort of comedic straight man next to what is almost surely a whitewashed portrayal of Tammy. She often appears to be oblivious to the realities that support her, despite the film's attempts to lionize her: she's outspoken and strident, from her early scenes in college classes to her brazen act as a new mother to claim her spot at the big boys' table of business (including the irritated and evil pseudo-villain of the story, Jerry Falwell, played by Vincent D'Onofrio). 

It's an interesting way to present her, and it will undoubtedly ring hollow to some viewers. Even I, more than once, guffawed at what I read as the film's heavy-handed emotional manipulations to get me to identify with Tammy. Decorated not unlike Dolly Parton, she is referred to at least once in the film as looking like a clown, a descriptor made more apt when she is asked to sing on television in her bedazzled or glitzy outfits. We see, with her, hints that her husband is unfaithful and leaning in to the other evangelicals' sexist conceits. She believes fervently in her own causes and in her own inner light, perhaps nowhere more clearly than in the film's recreation of her famed interview with AIDS-infected pastor Steve Pieters on live television. The scene's undeniable strength, harnessed seemingly effortlessly by Chastain, left this viewer in tears partly due to the performances and partly because I remember the hatred and vitriol people felt toward her as a result. None of the men around her have her warm, beating heart, the movie seems to say, and that's why they all failed where she persisted.

Then again, the movie does very little to give additional insight into Tammy's inner life. Chastain's incredible work at delivering the character to us afresh notwithstanding, the rest of the film feels very much like the documentary, with some added melodrama. There's no insight into exactly why Tammy so obsessed over her grotesque appearance, or the prep she underwent to appear and perform on tv. She gets a little bit of personal revelation during a couple scenes as she flirts with one of her musical collaborators, which results in a taut, emotionally violent confrontation with her husband and PTL directors. And, most disappointingly for me, the film does almost nothing with what I gauged to be its potential themes: the exact nature of her (or anyone's) faith is left opaque, and any journey of social or religious development is vaguely tied up with basic nods, in the end, to her perseverance and purity of heart. Which, again, feels a little too cleanly cut to me; I'm fine with celebrating the good things she did in life, because she definitely helped some people, but "just wanting to love people" puts people on a slippery slope and isn't enough for character veneration in 2021.

You can only really hold a movie up for what it is, though, rather than what you wanted. And as a vision of the past shockingly realized in the present, it's a dazzling movie. Come for Chastain, stay for Chastain, and be entertained all along the way.