“The Eyes of Tammy Faye” - Film Review
The Eyes of Tammy Faye is a sprawling biopic covering the love and lies of Tammy Faye Bakker (Jessica Chastain) and Jim Bakker (Andrew Garfield). Beginning with Tammy Faye’s introduction to religion in 1952 and concluding with her divorce from Jim in 1992, the film covers most of the major events of her life. Tammy Faye and Jim met at North Central Bible College in Minnesota in 1960 and immediately fell in love. They quickly wed the following year and believed that God had put them together to spread His word. What begins as a small puppet show put on at local churches turns into The 700 Club and their own religious television network. The couple had grandiose dreams of opening “Disney World for Christians” and believed that God wanted them to lead an opulent lifestyle. Unfortunately for them, all that glittered led to a series of indictments for fraud and sexual assault.
Adapted from the 2000 documentary of the same name, The Eyes of Tammy Faye wanted to be a reckoning of sorts. A reclamation of a complicated woman who was treated abysmally by the media. Pop culture media has recently been taking a look back at the women who were left in the vicious wake of their coverage. In recent years, Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Princess Diana, and Tonya Harding have been the subjects of fictitious films or documentaries critiquing the way they were treated by the media when they were at the peak of their fame. The incessant bullying from reporters and paparazzi wreaked havoc on their mental health, and society is only now interested in hearing about the women themselves. The Eyes of Tammy Faye was supposed to be Tammy Faye finally getting her due. So why was the movie terrified of letting the audience get to know her?
Because of its close release to Spencer, another biopic about a complex woman, it was impossible not to think of Spencer while watching The Eyes of Tammy Faye. Quite simply, The Eyes of Tammy Faye’s bloated, generic, paint-by-numbers screenplay only solidified how different and gorgeous Spencer was. It took every preconceived notion of the biopic and turned it on its head. Where The Eyes of Tammy Faye spans forty years, Spencer spans three days. And yet, in those three days, the audience ends up with a much deeper understanding of Diana Spencer than the coverage of forty years provides for Tammy Faye. It goes to show that a person’s entire life doesn’t have to be documented to offer an in-depth look at their struggles, wins, and losses.
Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
The problem is not with the acting. Jessica Chastain is magnetic as Tammy Faye and Andrew Garfield disappeared into Jim. Their performances are what sustains the movie as the years tick by. The only time their casting doesn’t quite work is at the beginning and the end of the film. No amount of prosthetics or acting talent can convincingly age forty-four-year-old Chastain down to eighteen, or age thirty-eight-year-old Garfield up to fifty two. It’s jarring to see a gray wig and comically large cheeks slapped onto Garfield in an effort to enhance the aging process. Make no mistake, Chastain and Garfield were the right casting choices to play Tammy Faye and Jim for a select few years of their lives. The movie simply forced them to overstay their welcome.
Tonally, The Eyes of Tammy Faye oscillates between taking itself too seriously and leaning into the campiness of its subject. Tammy Faye and Jim built their career on puppets, Tammy had the biggest ’80s hair and makeup, and their scandal was dubbed “Pearly Gate” as a reference to Watergate. They lived a life of utter opulence. A degree of campiness is baked into their story, and finding the balance between that and the darkness of addiction, fraud, and abuse is tricky. It’s a tonal balance that was mastered in I, Tonya, and would have worked exceptionally well in The Eyes of Tammy Faye. Unfortunately, the movie does not fully commit to either genre, and the end result is simply bland. There’s nothing new or exciting to see here.
The script never lingers in any moment long enough to truly explore who these people were. It has no interest in taking a critical look at televangelists, despite their sustained prevalence and despite the fact that the show Jim created, The 700 Club, is still airing today. Every plot point happens at whirlwind speed, which leaves some scenes feeling unintentionally comedic because of the amount of ground they cover. In the span of five minutes, Tammy acts on her crush on music producer Gary Paxton (Mark Wystrach), has her water break while kissing Gary, gives birth, and is screamed at by Jim in the hospital room for her supposed affair, mere hours after giving birth. It’s a slapdash series of events crammed together simply so the movie can steamroll on.
Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Perhaps most glaringly, the script leaves the audience without any meaningful insight into who Tammy Faye was. It’s a true shame. The few honest glimpses of her that the audience gets are of a woman who is much more radical than the conservative people who surround her. Her 1987 interview with Steven Pieters (Randy Havens), a gay Christian minister living with HIV, was nothing short of revolutionary. And for her to show him love and compassion, encouraging all Christians to do the same because “God loves everyone,” was nearly unheard of at the time. The movie chose to use direct quotes from that interview, and it was powerful to listen to Tammy Faye and Steven be so frank and honest, knowing that the words were actually spoken in 1987. Even today, that interview aired on a conservative religious network would be shocking and controversial. Tammy Faye’s presence on television, with her make-up and big hair, was groundbreaking in many ways. She wasn’t like the other televangelist wives, and she didn’t want to stay home and remain unseen.
The film is all the more frustrating because the script is only interested in covering all of the Big Moments of Tammy Faye and Jim’s life together without taking the time to focus on who Tammy Faye genuinely was. Like most biopics, this film follows Tammy Faye through the drug addiction that occurs after the rise of her fame without spending enough time to give it meaning or context. The years fly by with such reckless abandon that, when it finally ends, the movie does the opposite of what it seemingly set out to do. It leaves Tammy Faye as a tragic caricature and nothing more.
2 / 5 Stars
Key Takeaways + a Spoiler or Two:
I will be watching the documentary because I want to know the actual story! This movie felt like I was speed reading the Wikipedia page.
We love to see ex-Teenage Bounty Hunters actors showing up in award season prospects!!! First, Anjelica Bette-Fellini in The French Dispatch and now Randy Havens in The Eyes of Tammy Faye. I will never recover from Netflix canceling Teenage Bounty Hunters, but that’s for another day.
Andrew Garfield is a true movie star. He’s such an interesting actor to watch, and even if I didn’t love the movie, his performance was worth the watch.
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