The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2021 | USA | 126 minutes | Michael Showalter)
It’s hard to say what motivated an excavation of the televangelist boom and bust of the 1980s, but here we are with a biopic of the less complicit half of Jim and Tammy Faye Baker, the couple who built an empire on the backs of pledges to the world’s largest religious broadcasting network. Here, Michael Showalter buries Jessica Chastain under prosthetics, wigs, period costumes, and sometimes drag-levels of make-up to portray the life and times of the possibly-misunderstood, borderline-forgotten televangelist’s wife. It’s a surprisingly loving portrait that tells her often outlandish story without making a complete joke of her sincere faith and boundless love.
As far as the plot goes, it’s a straightforward and not particularly critical biopic that starts and the beginning and marches through until the end, hitting all of its marks, the turning points toward success and the missteps that set downfalls in motion. But as a performance from Chastain, it’s the stuff from which Oscars are made. Her performance runs the gamut from starry-eyed optimistic to tragic discarded figure, with stops along the way for oddball superstar, recorded artist tempted by a sexy Nashville producer, and neglected housewife with a bit of a pill problem. He even squeezes in a remarkable interview with an AIDS patient that casts Tammy Faye — and the Baker brand of evangelism — in sharp contrast to the looming right-wing religious conservatism that would soon take hold.
From the moment she meets Jim (Andrew Garfield, casting the preacher as weak of spine and singsongy of voice) in a Minnesota bible college and they fall in love over a shared interest in prosperity gospel, it envisions her as the motivation for the inspired parts of their rise and an oblivious victim when it comes to their downfall. She comes up with the idea of puppets for their early traveling preacher show to draw in the kids, pushes Jim to start his own network rather than stay subservient to Oral Roberts or fall in league with Jerry Falwell (Vincent D’Onofrio, a villainous figure at the periphery), and always reminds people of the at-risk kids they’re helping with the money that their call centers rake in. Showalter largely lets her off the hook, though, for not seeing an issue with an opulent lifestyle of fur coats for the whole family while Jim’s plugging constant deficits by turning their latest pains into fundraisers. Aside from capturing the changing landscape of each passing era, the production and costume design chart the trajectory of their fortunes through increasingly discordant glitz.
Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato’s documentary of the same title, on which Abe Sylvia based this script, provided both inspiration and copious material for Chastain’s intense study of Tammy Faye’s mannerisms, eccentricities, and intonations. This attention to detail shines through in creating a credible character even through all of the gaudy costumes and intense makeup, and you can see why the kind-hearted Baker had something of a late life renaissance as a misunderstood heroine, especially among the drag community. While it’s a bit dubious to cast the multiple scandals — financial, hetero-, and homosexual — that caused the collapse of their rickety empire as a takedown rather than an overdue downfall, it is still a sensitive excavation of a weird corner of near-forgotten history. That the direction and acting comes together to tell this tale gently and with space to find a kind heart among the wreckage is perhaps some kind of blessing.
The Eyes of Tammy Faye premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival; it is in limited theatrical release this weekend.