Dir: Michael Showalter. Starring: Jessica Chastain, Andrew Garfield, Cherry Jones, Vincent D’Onofrio. 12A, 126 minutes.
The Eyes of Tammy Faye encourages us to drink in every detail of Jessica Chastain’s physical transformation. Playing the gaudy but luminous televangelist and queer icon Tammy Faye Messner – and the latest “misunderstood woman in history” to be given the biopic treatment – Chastain sports spidery lashes, goldilocks ringlets, splotchy white eyeshadow and two prosthetic chipmunk cheeks. Besparkled to an excess, she borders on the ridiculous.
But “ridiculous” is a fairly precise summary of Tammy Faye’s public perception in late Eighties America. A television personality treated as both an Evangelical oddity and a figure of camp fun, she’d been made a scapegoat for her then-husband, the duplicitous Jim Bakker. He would go on to be accused of rape and later convicted for mail and wire fraud – it’s no surprise that he was punished only for misusing people’s money, not the alleged sexual assault. Tammy Faye’s personal extravagance, both in dress and in the way she expressed emotion, was treated as an equal sin.
This image of a woman who was simply “too much” for America’s tastes has been slowly unpacked and reconsidered in the subsequent decades – first by a 2000 documentary also titled The Eyes of Tammy Faye, narrated by RuPaul, and later by the popular podcast You’re Wrong About. Ten years have now passed since Chastain first acquired the rights to Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato’s documentary, and there’s a distinct sense that Chastain and her director, Wet Hot American Summer’s Michael Showalter, can do little more to rehabilitate Tammy Faye in the public eye. This is the final coat of gloss, then – the extra sprinkle of legitimacy that comes from an A-lister taking on a transformative, Oscar-primed role.
There’s some pop psychiatry at work in the film’s more conventional biopic stretches. Tammy Faye’s mother, Rachel (Cherry Jones), bans her from church because she’s the child of a previous marriage – a living, breathing mark of shame within her strict Pentecostal community. Tammy Faye responds by speaking in tongues and wetting herself in imitation of religious fervour. She’s immediately embraced by the congregation. Performance becomes her way of life. When she first meets Jim (Andrew Garfield), she’s so eager to please, both sexually and emotionally, that it largely blinds her to his growing corruption and self-interest.
The sincerity of Chastain’s performance – which never overplays its affectations – suggests that she possesses a lot of empathy for a woman whose vast capacity for love opened her up to exploitation. And she’s well-matched by man-of-the-hour Garfield, whose boyish grin is so emphatically genuine that Jim’s inevitable cruelty strikes as all the more vicious.
But there are drawbacks to a film that sticks this close to its subject, in both its perspective and its emotions. We never hear directly from Jessica Hahn, Bakker’s accuser, in a way that incidentally lessens the severity of her allegations. And while the film recreates Tammy Faye’s compassionate 1985 interview with Aids activist Steve Pieters, we don’t get a sense of the ripple effects of her support for the LGBTQ+ community. Particularly when rival pastor Jerry Falwell (Vincent D’Onofrio) was concurrently cementing the alliance of the Republican party and the Christian right that shapes so much of politics today. The Eyes of Tammy Faye has done right by its subject, but only at the cost of shrinking down her world.
