Eyes of Tammy Faye

This film is a fictionalization of the documentary of the same name: “The Eyes of Tammy Faye.” I remember seeing the documentary on the IFC channel when I first came to the Bay Area and realizing that there was a lot more to Tammy Faye (then-)Messner (formerly Bakker; née LaValley) than the scandals might have predicted. The documentary portrayed Messner sympathetically, regarding her as someone who wanted to share the gospel’s and her love of Christ while ambitious men were plotting to use television and their ministries to chase money, power, sex, or political influence. The film is a fictionalization of that interpretation of events.

In an extraordinary performance, Jessica Chastain demonstrates why she’s going to be one of the greats of her generation. Her imitation of Tammy Faye is outstanding both in expression, voice, cadence, and song. Vincent D’Onofrio does a stellar interpretation of the clarity of purpose, single-mindedness, and Machiavellian aspects of Jerry Falwell. I found Andrew Garfield’s interpretation of Jim Bakker underwhelming: he seemed to channeling of Mr. Rogers while mining the middle-management rage demonstrated by Richard Riehle in his character “Tom Smykowski” from “Office Space.” Whatever the opposite of upstaging is, Garfield does it again and again. For a character who needed to manifest some drive an ambition along with a shepherd’s energy, the captured performance really only communicates the latter.

Nevertheless, the movie is enjoyable enough, and Chastain-as-Bakker-as-seen-through-grainy-VHS-quality-tube-screens has a lot of delightful visual aspects.

As with any biopic that’s rooted in scandal, we know that at some point, like a “Behind the Music” documentary, the drugs, the sex, the money (or its illicit misappropriation), the fame, etc. will eventually reach a fever pitch and crash. In her portrayal of this period, Chastain accords with the documentary and gives us a believable case for believing Tammy Faye to be too simple, too innocent, and too left out to have been a perpetrator of a committed crime.

As for rehabilitation, Chastain’s performance highlights, as did the documentary, that in the era where “HIV-positive” or “AIDS-having” were regarded as a Bibilical-style uncleanliness plagues, Tammy Faye, like the contemporaneous Princess Diana, humanized the suffering of these lonely and frightened humans. Director Michael Showalter (Doug from “The State!?”) presents these scenes in a way to rehabilitate Messner’s image for a generation that never watched her (Messner died in 2007).

Spoilers: Around homosexuality as a theme in the film

Showalter takes up a problematic tack, to my view, in the hinting of Bakker as a closeted homosexual. It’s tough to maintain consistency because early scenes of Tammy and James suggest vibrant sexual chemistry (and a strange callback to “Hedwig and the Angry Inch’s” bathtub lust). The factual Bakker has claimed that he is not gay and that the intimations that he was/is were lies used to tarnish his reputation by frenemy-turned-enemy Jerry Falwell. So does/did Bakker believe homosexuality to be morally repugnant? Or was he going along with the evangelical movement for political and economic advantage? Are we to believe that he’s lying to the public, himself, and his wives? I found this aspect of the film very difficult to parse and interpret and for a weighty plot thread, it wasn’t given enough time. I’d have preferred to see it cut or have the existing scene of some “is-it-more-than-chummy-tickle-wrestling-with-his-assistant?”.

All that said, in this part of the year in this depth of our second year of the plague year(s) it was a higher caliber movie.