We find out next Tuesday whether Jessica Chastain is in the running for a Best Actress Oscar. And I’ll be gutted if she isn’t. As Tammy Faye Bakker (a hard-scrabble bomb-shell turned super-wealthy 80s televangelist-turned national joke) Chastain is fabulously watchable and every bit as bewitching as Lady Gaga in House of Gucci.
Her Tammy Faye is a calculating and libidinous innocent, a walking paradox whose big hair and notoriously lash-tastic eyes never overshadow her brain. That we believe in this character as a restless college girl, a cajoling young wife, a chirpy singer, an unconventional preacher, a cultural pioneer and, finally, a painfully gutsy fifty-something survivor demonstrates the range of an actress whose best work, of late, has been for TV (see Scenes from a Marriage).
