Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Eyes of Tammy Faye’ on HBO Max, in Which Jessica Chastain Finds the Heart of the Woman Beneath All the Makeup

Now on HBO Max after a brief 2021 theatrical run, The Eyes of Tammy Faye is a reminder of the good ol’ days, when crass hypocrisy could actually ruin a person. These days, the moral reprobates just double down on their bullshit and keep on keepin’ on, don’t they? Anyway, the film takes the 2000 documentary of the same title and feature-matizes it, casting Jessica Chastain as The Eyelash’d One, Tammy Faye, and Andrew Garfield as her smarmy hubs Jim, and following the highs and lows of their shameless, shameless career as Christian-evangelist TV grifter-entertainers. Its aim is to get past the delicious but mean-spirited mid-’80s schadenfreude the Bakker saga wrought, and reframe Tammy Faye as a flawed human with a good spirit; now let’s see if it succeeds.

THE EYES OF TAMMY FAYE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The movie begins in 1994, then jumps back to 1952, so gird yourself for a multi-decade biopic. Hoo boy? Yeah, kind of, hoo boy. The late-century scene zeroes in on the thing in the title, permanently eyelinered above permanently liplinered lips, which are pretty much what we of a certain vintage remember most about Tammy Faye: excess cosmetics. We’ll get back to this scene later in the movie, because now, we jump back to young Tammy (Chandler Head), who yearns mightily to go to church in International Falls, Minnesota, where the congregants are all acting highly disturbingly possessed by the LAWD. But she can’t enter even though her mother (Cherry Jones) is the pianist, because Tammy’s a child of divorce, and that’s just scandalous, although mostly just in the eyes of people who are assholes. Tammy sneaks in anyway, and ends up writhing on the floor and speaking in tongues, which is for sure one hell of an auspicious way to first experience the transcendent joy of religion, especially if you’ll eventually become the immortal Tammy Faye.

Now it’s 1960, and Tammy Faye (Chastain) is going to bible college, where she takes a big ol’ shine to Jim Bakker’s (Garfield) assertion that their god does not want them to be poor. Material wealth, why, it’s right there in the scripture if you look hard enough. Next thing you know, they’re trying really hard to not grope each other’s erogenous zones — he describes her breasts as “clusters of fruit,” the masher — and failing. They’re only human, remember! By 1965, they’re married so it’s OK to have sex while God watches, and also beginning to fulfill their dream of spreading the gospel and filling their coffers, via a revival tour with Jim preaching and Tammy Faye singing and the both of them performing puppet shows so they can get ’em early on when they’re impressionable. Moments after Jim’s aircraft carrier-sized Cadillac — foreshadowing alert — has been repo’d outside their crappy motel, a man approaches them with a TV deal in hand. “Those puppets of yours touched me deeply,” the man says, proving that the clearest way to get closer to Christ is through creepy double entendres.

And thus begins the Bakkers’ televangelism career, which builds layer upon layer just like Tammy Faye’s makeup. They hang with Pat Robertson (Gabriel Olds) and Jerry Falwell (Vincent D’Onofrio!), and jump from Jim only on The 700 Club to him and Tammy on their own with The PTL Club, a program that eventually became a satellite network with 20 million viewers, all of whom pretty much sent the Bakkers money that they put to charitable use except when they were funding their luxe lifestyle. (Be sure to pronounce that “loosh” with an abundance of flair, e.g., “looooooosshhhhhh.”) It seems as if people are enamored and hypnotized and bedazzled by the Bakkers’ personae, which make pollyannas look like John Wayne Gacy.

But pollyannas they ain’t — you already know that. They slip up here and there and the marriage gets strained. They have a couple children along the way somewhere, and considering how the film presents them, I think their names are Neglecto and Afterthought. There are rumblings of financial disparities and the press trying to chip away at the gilded tower they erected (please note word choice) to show their love for the lord, but Tammy Faye is kind of sheltered from the shady bookkeeping. She hits the Ativan a little too hard but also ruffles Falwell’s glowering villainous feathers by promoting penis pumps for those with erectile dysfunction — it’s a real-life problem, she argues — and showing compassion for gay people and those suffering from AIDS. We also know their empire is destined to crumble under the weight of their immense greed and fallibility. The rains are gonna come, and boy, is the mascara gonna run.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Chastain playing Tammy Faye is a lot like Gary Oldman playing Winston Churchill (Darkest Hour) or Meryl Streep playing Julia Child (Julie & Julia) or Margot Robbie playing Tonya Harding (I, Tonya) or Al Pacino playing Jimmy Hoffa (The Irishman) or, or, or…

Performance Worth Watching: Chastain is thee star here, without a doubt, giving a not-quite Oscar-winning-caliber performance — more like fifth-Oscar-nominee-in-a-weak-year-type performance. Please don’t take that as faint praise; she’s tremendous, and the best reason to watch the film.

Memorable Dialogue: A congregant’s gleeful exhortation as young Tammy is fully possessed by the LAWD: “She’s peeing herself, praise God!”

Sex and Skin: Just a couple of gropey, straddley non-nude scenes that God surely thinks are perfectly PG-13.

Our Take: This week in Let’s Remember Some Major Mid-’80s Schadenfreude, we have The Eyes of Tammy Faye, which is thick with prosthetic facial adornments, but a bit thin in storytelling detail. Thankfully, Chastain gives a convincing and complex performance from beneath a couple of convincing wads of cheek putty, or the movie might be little more than Jim and Tammy Faye’s Greatest Fails. Director Michael Showalter (The Big Sick) comes precariously close to perpetuating caricatures, stopping just short of gawking outright at his characters’ superhuman outrageousness. They’re loathsome and smarmy in their piousness — Garfield embraces this, reducing Jim to the purest personification of snivelousness — and they got what they deserved. But it’s too easy to think there’s no more to the story, to understand the whys beyond the hows.

And that’s where Chastain taps into the heart of Tammy Faye’s character, flawed as she may be. The performance implies that she was motivated by a desire to perform, to love and be loved, and by extension, to ultimately use her platform for good. Sure, she’s complicit in all the shameless bilking, and should shoulder some responsibility for their malfeasances, whether she chose to look the other way as she loaded her closet with mink, or was just clueless (both could be true). Chastain carries all this in her characterization, even as the film doesn’t fully capitalize on the current moment, when we as a culture are reevaluating the Britneys and Lewinskys of the world, stripping their narratives of sensationalism and seeing beyond tabloid gossip and nasty late-night comedy monologues. One scene finds Tammy Faye elbowing her way next to Jim at the all-male televangelist power-player dinner table — where the main course is hot dogs! — and the movie could use more such moments with greater contextual implications, and fewer boilerplate-biopic montages, which flood the story with unnecessary kitsch.

The movie’s conventional angles make it feel like a lost opportunity, a lazy and formulaic outing leaning too heavily on its charismatic star. The screenplay addresses Falwell’s growing right-wing political influence in a scene or three, placing him at odds with Tammy’s culturally liberal leanings. D’Onofrio glowers and assumes a cartoonish staccato cadence as his Falwell brags about helping Reagan get re-elected, and simmers as he watches Tammy Faye compassionately interview Steven Pieters, a gay man with AIDS, on The PTL Club (a real-life event scripted nearly word-for-word here). But Showalter never leverages the conflict into any meaningful drama. The Eyes of Tammy Faye mostly just reiterates familiar biographical highs and lows for their entertainment value, exploiting its subjects’ gaudy lifestyle and giving us big eyefuls of hairpiece porn. The laughs feel kind of cheap, but Chastain cuts through the frontage and persuades us that Tammy Faye is a not-so-easily-defined woman, fallible, empathetic and not so deserving of being the butt of the joke.

Our Call: The Eyes of Tammy Faye sure does biopic the hell out of the Bakkers, and never really asserts the relevance of the story. But the you-probably-wanna-see-Chastain-play-Tammy-Faye factor is high, so it’s with some reservations that I say STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.