'The Eyes of Tammy Faye' Review
PG-13: Sexual content and drug abuse
Runtime: 1 Hr and 56 Minutes
Production Companies: Freckle Films, MWM Studios, Semi-Formal Productions
Distributor: Searchlight Pictures
Director: Michael Showalter
Writer: Abe Sylvia
Cast: Jessica Chastain, Andrew Garfield, Cherry Jones, Fredric Lehne, Louis Cancelmi, Sam Jaeger, Gabriel Olds, Mark Wystrach, Vincent D'Onofrio
Release Date: September 17, 2021
In Theaters
An intimate look at the extraordinary rise, fall, and redemption of televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker. In the 1970s and ‘80s, Tammy Faye and her husband, Jim Bakker, rose from humble beginnings to create the world's largest religious broadcasting network and theme park and were revered for their message of love, acceptance, and prosperity. Tammy Faye was legendary for her indelible eyelashes, her idiosyncratic singing, and her eagerness to embrace people from all walks of life. However, it wasn't long before financial improprieties, scheming rivals, and scandal toppled their carefully constructed empire.
With The Eyes of Tammy Faye, comedy-oriented director Michael Showalter widens his reach as a filmmaker. Given that the film is a period piece that spans several decades, Showalter gets larger in scope and scale than he did with any of his previous features. From a directional standpoint, Showalter matches Bakker's high spirit and upbeat energy through the tone, lighting, and even costuming. When the lens gets intimate with her inner turmoil, it’s personalized and features powerful shots as Chastain commands the screen. Though Showalter’s direction works best when it centers around Tammy and Jim’s televangelist career, exuding campy spunk on the same borderline comedic and satirical level as Danny McBride’s The Righteous Gemstones, he delivers enough personal range to get you up close with his lead.
Every couple of years or so, Jessica Chastain would star in a leading vehicle, specifically a drama, to further her already exceptional abilities as an actress. She always gives 1000% with every role no matter what material she’s given. Once again, Chastain is leaving you absolutely breathless with her strong and committed leading performance. The Minnesotan accent along with her upbeat line deliveries is proof that Chastain dove headfirst into her Tammy Faye research to do her justice. Even their singing voices are eerily similar. Chastain truly gives her all to bring justice to the complexity and humanity that Tammy Faye had.
The film’s strongest area involves the relationship between her and her mother Rachel LaValley (Cherry Jones). Throughout the span of the film, there’s a well-developed arc between them. The film establishes that due to her being a child of divorce, she’s shunned from her local Christian church and it also reflects how her mom perceives her. You get a great glimpse into Tammy Faye’s insecurities when she clashes with her mom and how it psychologically factors into her desire for love and validation.
When the film gets to the latter years of Tammy Faye’s life, where she gets more tan and wears more pounds of foundation on her face, the makeup and hairstyling go all in to make Chastain completely unrecognizable. The prosthetics are absolutely outstanding and it elevates Chastain's performance. It’s not as distracting as Rami Malek’s Bohemian Rhapsody teeth, for you feel Chastain has become this larger-than-life woman full of Christian love and bravado. If only the movie itself reciprocated the same type of power as Chastain.
The Eyes of Tammy Faye suffers from a major identity crisis in the story department. From the moment Jim Bakker (Andrew Garfield) and Tammy Faye fall for each other, the film doesn’t know if it wants to be a character study for the titular lead or a straight-up biopic. For a film with a nearly two-hour runtime, it moves at breakneck speed, stuffing in as many details of the Bakkers’ career and relationship that it can in a straightforward fashion. When it gets to the meat of Jim and Tammy Faye’s on-screen career, it noticeably lacks substance, for it reaches a Bohemian Rhapsody level of blandness as it pushes you right past the most defining moments of her career and personality. By the end, you’re left with more questions than answers. This film is based on a 78-minute doc, but I could only imagine how much more weight the doc was able to hold with a shorter run time. If Abe Sylvia’s screenplay was confident enough to separate itself from the source and let his narrative pick a lane of its own (delivering a character study on a tragic figure) rather than a middle-of-the-road hodgepodge, this would’ve been a great movie to write home about.
Though the film serves as a great one-woman show for Jessica Chastain, her co-stars are unfortunately far weaker. Sad to say, Andrew Garfield is miscast as Jim Bakker. Garfield is known to have an exceptional range but this film made me realize that the British-American actor can only pull off ONE American accent. He’s not bad per se, but he’s so damn restrained throughout. Compared to his work in Mainstream where he also portrayed a media sensation piece of shit dude, Garfield isn’t very noteworthy in this one. For someone who should look like Jesse Plemons, Jim Bakker ends up looking like Fred Rogers. Garfield can do a southern accent but fails to do a consistent midwestern one. Due to this, Chastain ends up running laps around him as far as performance goes. Apart from him, you also have Vincent D'Onofrio as conservative televangelist Jerry Falwell Sr. and he’s just repeating his Wilson Fisk mannerisms but with a more heinous Republican approach. It hurts to see everyone outside of Chastain not give their all. Hell, the approach the actors took on The Righteous Gemstones is more Oscar-worthy than this attempts to be.
I wanted to love The Eyes of Tammy Faye, for it features a juggernaut powerhouse performance by Jessica Chastain and it shines whenever it settles into being a character story on a sincere yet tragic figure. Unfortunately, through repetitive montages and bland biopic tropes that make the film too fast-paced and lacking any flavor, this drama fails to show the truth and significance of the eyes of the beholder.
