The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2021)

Fine work from SAG winner and Oscar nominee Jessica Chastain

Jessica Chastain’s intricate portrayal makes for a compelling Tammy Faye Bakker

The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2021)

Now streaming on HBO Max

You don’t have to share a belief to marvel at the rapture of a believer.  And you don’t have to take on faith the “convictions” of a believer in order to admire an actress who brings the person to throbbing, troubled life.

Jessica Chastain does a remarkable evocation of the slow unraveling of the late Tammy Faye Bakker (who died of cancer 2007) in this biopic. Her Tammy shines, and yet she’s hard to get a handle on.

Tammy Faye caught the public imagination for two reasons.  First, her sparkling, almost childlike declarations of Christian faith seemed even more arresting when they came from her heavily made-up face. She exuded a kind of radiance with her glossily extended eyelashes and those eyes glowing with – what exactly?  Hope for her own future?  Concern for the needy?  Actual Christian faith?  The movie says it could have been all three and more.

Second, she became best known for her fall from grace, shared with her plastically attractive, robotically faith-spouting husband Jim, a charming con man and from what we see here a quite compelling preacher of the Gospel, steeped in Biblical truisms.

How did two such outwardly “inspired” people betray the faith they espoused to their millions of followers and also lose their cherished trust in each other?

Jim and Tammy meet in 1960 at Minnesota’s North Central Bible College as giggling undergraduates.  Earlier we’ve seen Tammy as a child of her divorced, remarried mother Rachel (Cherry Jones), who plays piano at a small evangelical church.  Tammy gains entry to the congregation, and gets her first taste of “rapture”, through a ruse.  At age 12, she enters the church mid-service and falls to the floor in a “faint” before the gathering of saints.  The girl speaks in tongues, writhing on what in the small Black Baptist church of my youth we called “the threshing floor”.

Predictably, she rises, “saved”.  Thus, it seems all but foreordained when she finds a soulmate (or is he already a co-conspirator?) in handsome Jim Bakker, who is steeped in the holiness of the Word but already spouting a belief that God doesn’t want anyone to be poor – that there’s no contradiction in being saved and having a fat savings account.

The Eyes of Tammy Faye runs for more than two hours and never comes up with a clear explanation for this parallel love of God and money.  It’s not just Tammy Faye and Jim who end up trapped in gloss.  The movie does, too.  Michael Showalter’s direction barrels through hectic plot turns, dithers over gaudy sets and costumes, but doesn’t focus cleanly enough on what leads to the couple’s moral collapse.

Chastain pulls off a phenomenal transformation from rural Midwest innocent into the heavily made-up televangelist Tammy Faye Baker.  I never wanted to laugh at Chastain’s oddly affecting re-creation:  a self-deluded woman with a seemingly transparent heart.

Andrew Garfield gives Jim a perfectly pitched cornball charm that we can believe others might fall for, but which looks suspicious almost from the beginning.  In the eyes of the world, Jim seems the more inspired visionary of the two.  Actually, he’s the greedier one.  He dreams bigger and understands that dreams cost money.

Chastain gives Tammy a kind of febrile grace, which is the real mystery of the phenomenon she became.  How did she and her husband, the ambitious and, finally, wretched Jim, fool so many for so long?

The movie never really explains their eye-popping success, garishly opulent lifestyle, or their failed marriage.  But I don’t think Abe Sylvia’s script sets out to expose rot at the core of Christian evangelism.  It takes the couple’s faith on faith.  They both state their love of God so often and so fervently that we’re from the beginning invited to see them as, well, maybe not wholly sincere, but not fully onto themselves and their deceit, either.

Jessica Chastain and Andrew Garfield as Tammy and Jim call on the faithful to give

Jim and Tammy become a hit with their own show and TV network, The PTL Club.  Their broadcast’s opulent sets, massively produced choral music, and glitzy rhinestone costumes get the on-air phone banks jingling and millions of dollars pouring in.

We see the overreach before they do.  Tammy’s plainspoken mother Rachel is the first to warn Tammy that she’s become entranced by material possessions that are edging out faith.  Jim promises their congregants that God’s love for them is never more obvious than when they’re “blessed” with success.  Riches and righteousness can partner.  The more you believe, the richer you have every reason to believe you can be.  So, why not double your contribution?

When does Tammy catch on to this sly corruption in Jim's message?  Was she convinced that the luxury she was surrounded with came from God – or from all those phoned-in donations?  Did she really believe the two amounted to the same thing?

Glaringly, we never hear from the thousands of poor working people the couple are bilking.  Why does Tammy seem so oblivious to the flimflam, so incurious about the bills that are piling up?

Jim uses and borrows against the donated money to fund extravagant building schemes – to provide shelter for unwed mothers and addicts, true enough, but he always includes lavish living quarters for himself, Tammy and their two children.  (For these and other frauds Jim eventually served nearly five years in prison.) 

We learn that Jim has been accused multiple times of unwanted sexual advances towards men, including members of PTL’s staff.  But all we ever see is a playful wrestling match on the floor between Jim and a staff member, without much sexual innuendo.  Yet we’re told that Jim’s furtive fooling around with men went on for years.

Tammy’s infidelity with a Svengali-like music producer happens when she’s eight months pregnant, and it isn’t fully consummated.  We’re not shown other infidelities, but they were frequent enough to infuriate Jim (who sought and eventually was granted a divorce).

Somehow, Chastain’s endless array of glittery costumes and bewitching eye makeup pull us through the dodgy writing and direction.  Chastain leaves a lingering sense of the hurt, needy child Tammy remained all her life, with that artificial “brave” chuckle and those thick lashes batting over eyes close to weeping.

She remains enigmatic behind all the makeup.  What happened to the soul inside?  We never get a clear enough hint.  Like her followers, we’re asked to believe in her goodness.  To this day many still report that Tammy was often exceedingly kind, and there’s no doubt that she performed solid good deeds.  Chastain sets this out movingly.

But how much empathy can we extend to the “sincerely deluded”, like Jim and Tammy?  Plenty, some might say, because they’re so darned interesting.  But from the little honest caring that I saw here, set against the chicanery, I couldn’t summon much compassion.