Film review

  • The Eyes of Tammy Faye

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Michael Showalter (2021)

    After her breakthrough in 2011, Jessica Chastain looked to have the film world at her feet.  The year saw her deservedly lauded in pictures as different as Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, Jeff Nichols’s Take Shelter and Tate Taylor’s The Help.   She received an Oscar nomination for the last-named and another, the following year, for her work in Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty.  Since then, Chastain has appeared in high-profile films without getting juicy parts or delivering the goods quite as her annus mirabilis had seemed to predict.  Michael Showalter’s The Eyes of Tammy Faye, produced by Chastain’s own production company (Freckle Films), is a rather different matter.   The film is no great shakes but Jessica Chastain is.  It’s good to see her make an impact again (and back in Oscar contention).

    This is a success against the odds for two reasons.  Showalter’s biography of the televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker (1942-2007) is a shallow, one-thing-after-another piece of storytelling (the screenplay is by Abe Sylvia).   And Tammy Faye is a tricky assignment.  The real thing looked and sounded like a cartoon of the American appetite/knack for serving God and Mammon.  How does an actress interpret this lacquered, mascaraed confection, who loves Jesus but also expensive clothes and flashy jewellery, without seeming largely to make fun of her?  There may be an underlying satirical streak in her portrait of Tammy Faye but Chastain commits to the role with such sympathetic verve that the performance works very well.  She carries the film with aplomb.  Despite the increasing, encasing layers of make-up, her face conveys Tammy’s developing individuality.  The eyes of the title really are the window to her soul.

    A scene-setting prologue, set in 1952, sketches in the family and religious community in which Tammy Faye La Valley was raised, in International Falls, Minnesota.  (The ten-year-old Tammy is played by Chandler Head.)  Eight years later, she has enrolled at North Central Bible College in Minneapolis, where she falls in love with Jim Bakker (Andrew Garfield), a fellow student and ardent sermon-giver.  Within a few months, they’re married and have quit college to go on the road as gospel preachers.  Jim does the serious evangelising, Tammy songs and the voices of puppets that are part of the couple’s act.  They gain the attention of Pat Robertson (Gabriel Olds) and start hosting a children’s show on his Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN).  Jim, who also hosts the Network’s The 700 Club, does the deals with Robertson and other big names in the Christian broadcasting world but Michael Showalter makes clear Tammy’s independent-mindedness and drive.  At a party hosted by Robertson, she’s unafraid to challenge the political and homophobic pronouncements of Jerry Falwell (Vincent D’Onofrio), whom Jim is cravenly nervous of upsetting.  It’s Tammy who urges her husband to set up their own television network.  By 1974, the Bakkers have parted company with CBN and established the Praise the Lord (PTL) channel.

    Their flagship show, The PTL Club, ‘mixed “glitzy entertainment with down-home family values” and preached a “‘prosperity gospel’ which put a divine seal of approval on both the growing affluence of American evangelicals and the showy lifestyles of their television ministers’ (Wikipedia).  Jim and Tammy rake in cash in the form of donations invited from viewers while the show airs, and she becomes an increasingly confident singer but Tammy and Jim’s success cuts no ice with her mother, Rachel (Cherry Jones), who’s devout, pessimistic and reliably disapproving.  Even in 1952, Rachel is scolding her daughter’s religious enthusiasm.  She deplores Tammy’s impulsive marriage.  In the mid-1970s, Rachel and her husband, Fred Grover (Fredric Lehne), Tammy’s stepfather, move in with the Bakkers, who are now based in South Carolina:  it’s a puzzle both that Tammy invites them and that Rachel accepts the invitation.  Tammy shows her mother off as she and Fred sit in the front row of the studio audience for The PTL Club, and asks her to take a bow.  While the rest of the audience applauds, Rachel stays rooted to her seat.  Her face doesn’t crack.  She’s the first to warn Tammy about newspaper reports of financial improprieties in the running of PTL that will come to swamp the Bakkers and eventually send Jim to jail, convicted on multiple fraud charges, in 1989.

    The Eyes of Tammy Faye is based on a 2000 documentary of the same name (directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato) and Showalter relies considerably on clips of news film to stitch the narrative together.  At the start, this supplies the televangelism context efficiently.  As the film proceeds, it’s a means of encapsulating events – something the screenplay otherwise fails to do.  Showalter and Abe Sylvia seem to think that anything that happens is tantamount to a dramatic development.  As a result, they tend to illustrate the main themes repeatedly – there’s a surfeit of scenes instancing the Bakkers’ withering marriage – yet there are gaps in their coverage of the pair’s off-screen lives, and relationship with their fan base.

    The couple’s two children, born in 1970 and 1975, are mostly absent from proceedings – even mentions of them are thin on the ground.  There’s little of Rachel’s reaction to her daughter’s profligacy and her son-in-law’s chicanery, even though she might be expected to see these as a crowning vindication of her blanket disapproval of Tammy Faye’s life choices.  In her first encounter with Falwell, when he deplores homosexuality, Tammy brightly asserts that ‘God didn’t make any junk’; her continuing, evidently genuine compassion for all God’s children is underlined in her television interview, midway through the AIDS crisis, with HIV-positive gay pastor Steve Pieters (Randy Havens).  Showalter gives next to no sense, though, of how Tammy’s more liberal impulses play to the Bakkers’ conservative following – or of audience feedback on her collapse during a live show recording, after she’s learned about a sex scandal involving Jim and popped too many of the pills to which she’s become addicted.

    Tammy and Jim both have extra-marital affairs:  he with at least one woman and a sinister-from-the-word-go male colleague (Louis Cancelmi); she with Nashville record producer, Gary S Paxton (Mark Wystrach), who’s engaged to further her career as a recording artist.  There’s a clear spark, too, between Tammy and Roe Messner (Sam Jaeger), a building contractor brought in to develop Jim and Falwell’s plans for a Christian theme park, and whom Tammy married in 1993, after divorcing her husband while he was in prison.  While the actors playing Paxton and Messner are convincing and Vincent D’Onofrio is a persuasive, louring Jerry Falwell, the casting of key larger roles doesn’t quite satisfy.

    The hair and make-up team (Linda Dowds, Stephanie Ingram and Justin Raleigh) that has done such remarkable work on Jessica Chastain has also, judging from online images of the younger Jim Bakker, expertly replicated his hairstyle and flesh tone but Andrew Garfield still doesn’t seem right.  He’s fine in the early scenes:  properly impassioned in the pulpit at the bible college, appealing in his whirlwind courtship of Tammy.  After that, the performance goes wrong.  In a home-truths showdown (in which Jim brands his wife ‘a bottomless pit – and you keep asking for more, with what whining, grating Betty Boop voice’), Tammy tells her husband that ‘a woman needs a man’.  ‘I am a man!’ he insists, ‘No, you’re a boy,’ she retorts, and you see what she means.  Although Garfield’s now in his late thirties, his looks remain unarguably boyish.  He’s also much more handsome than the original.  Perhaps to compensate for that, he overplays Jim’s lily-livered nastiness, turning him into a creep who’s not even a very plausible TV performer.  As Rachel Grover, Cherry Jones is an impressively implacable presence, all the more powerful for being emotionally undemonstrative.  For most of the film, though, she’s too old for her part.

    The film ends in 1994[1] when, Tammy, after struggling to revive her television career, receives an out-of-the-blue phone call inviting her to perform at a Christian concert at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma:  the woman on the other end of the line explains that, as a child, she was involved in one of the Bakkers’ shows, and has always remembered Tammy’s kindness.  After some hesitation, Tammy agrees to appear.  On the night, she delivers a tentative homily from the stage before launching into ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’.  It’s presumably her fantasy that, as the number builds, she sees a gospel choir performing with her, and the concert audience, hitherto unresponsive and looking almost embarrassed by her presence, transported by the song’s power and taking up the chorus.  Jessica Chastain, whenever she sings, is splendid but it’s even more unlikely that much of the film’s presumed audience will join in the rousing finale:  Michael Showalter is surely preaching to the converted in his unflattering depiction of the Christian right in American broadcasting.  Even so, this comeback climax is touching and entirely apt.  It plays out as the triumphant last scene of a musical biopic, where the star, after battling manifold adversity, finally wins through.  The Eyes of Tammy Faye gives the impression that its heroine may have been spiritually sincere as well as a material girl but it leaves you in no doubt that hers was chiefly a show business story.

    10 February 2022

    [1] According to Wikipedia, this was also the year in which Jim Bakker was released from prison.  He returned to the televangelism circuit in 2003 and seems to be still going strong today, despite hitting the headlines a couple of years ago when he (a) suffered a stroke and (b) tried selling colloidal silver supplements advertised as a surefire Covid remedy.

  • The Souvenir Part II

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Joanna Hogg (2021)

    Like part one, part two is the film of its year, according to Sight & Sound’s annual poll of critics.  As with its predecessor, that accolade overstates the merits of The Souvenir Part II and reflects the perceived worthiness of its subject matter – the personal and creative development of a woman film-maker – as much as its actual quality.  Even so, Joanna Hogg’s film is engrossing and, more surprisingly, enjoyable.  The Souvenir was recently shown on television; catching the tail end of it on BBC iPlayer a few days before seeing Part II supplied helpful memory-jogging context for the sequel.  Although I can’t see Hogg’s diptych as a masterpiece, these semi-autobiographical films do amount to a substantial achievement.

    In the climax to part one, the protagonist Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) learned that her drug-addict boyfriend Anthony (Tom Burke) had been found dead – in the toilets of the Wallace Collection, the museum where the couple saw the Fragonard painting from which the film takes its name.  Part II picks up from this point.  Julie’s mother and father – Rosalind (Tilda Swinton) and William (James Spencer Ashworth) – are gently sympathetic but unable to help their daughter much in her bereavement.  At the film school where she’s studying, people keep telling Julie they’re sorry for her loss.  She visits Anthony’s shocked parents (Barbara Peirson and James Dodds), who aren’t seen again thereafter, and a psychotherapist (Gail Ferguson), who is.  The slow progress forward from the immediate aftermath of Anthony’s death, although it takes some getting used to, convincingly expresses Julie’s struggle to ‘move on’.  Shots illustrating the changing seasons – trees and flowers in bud and bloom, etc – punctuate the narrative throughout but Hogg, with one notable exception late on, doesn’t use dates on the screen or news stories on a TV screen-within-the-screen to indicate how much time is passing.  The film’s momentum starts to build – and Julie emerges from mourning to gain force and agency as a character – as she devises what will be her film school graduation piece.

    In the first film, Anthony’s influence on Julie qua creative was imperceptible.  Part II more than compensates for that:  her graduation film seems to be, essentially, an account of their relationship.  The film school authorities (Crispin Buxton, Richard Bevan, Steve Gough, Jonathan Hourigan) take a dim view of her sketchy scenario; her on-the-fly approach on set exasperates the assistant director (Nick Woolgar).  Julie continues to get financial help from her mother and enjoys the moral and practical support of fellow students Garance (Ariane Lebed) and, especially, Marland (Jaygann Ayeh), but she increasingly stands up for what she wants, and for herself.  She doesn’t develop a new romantic relationship, and this aspect of the story is particularly well handled.  Although the film that Julie is making is about her and Anthony, Hogg doesn’t thereby suggest that he remains the only man in her life.   Quite early on, Julie is virtually forced to have sex with a fellow student (Charlie Heaton), who, from the moment he sees her, appears to have only one thing on his mind.  Her not having sex with two other men has more, and more interesting, impact.

    First, there’s Pete (Harris Dickinson), a theatre actor engaged to play Anthony’s alter ego in Julie’s film.  Pete is anxious to get a better understanding of his role and his character’s motivation – anxious, too, since he knows about the real Anthony, not to intrude on private grief.  Harris Dickinson asks Pete’s questions with such penetrating but sensitive urgency that you wonder if Julie will be charmed – if Pete will become the new Anthony off set, too – but nothing more happens.  Even better is a slightly longer episode involving film editor Max (Joe Alwyn).  After working together on Julie’s footage, Max invites her out for a drink, and she agrees.  In the pub, it’s clear they like each other, and it’s she who asks if he wants to come back to her Knightsbridge flat.  Max politely declines, explaining that he has promised to cook supper for his boyfriend, who’s not in good health.  Julie absorbs this affably; there appear to be no hard feelings.  Beautifully played, the scene is a good example of Hogg’s subtle ways of pointing up the 1980s setting of the story.  Without concealing his sexuality, Max doesn’t acknowledge it until he needs to do so.  His partner’s illness may (or may not) be a reference to AIDS.  When, very occasionally, the period detail doesn’t convince, it’s probably a consequence of Hogg’s encouraging her cast to improvise.  In a spat between Julie and the assistant director, his every second word is ‘like’ – not such a popular mannerism forty years ago as it is now.

    The difference that Julie’s/Joanna’s gender has made to critical reception of the two films is no surprise but striking nevertheless.  It’s inconceivable that a male protagonist from the same posh, wealthy background as Julie – aspiring artist or otherwise – would be considered so intrinsically sympathetic.  In Part II, as in the first film, Marland is a very simple character, little more than nice and supportive to Julie.  I don’t know if he’s based on one of Hogg’s friends from film school and, if so, whether that friend was Black or if putting Jaygann Ayeh in the role is meant to be colour-blind casting.  Since Marland is one of only two significant non-white people in Julie’s story, it’s hard not to notice his ethnicity.  If he were the loyal sidekick, and nothing more, to a white hero rather than a white heroine, the writer-director would, with good reason, be hauled over the coals.  I’m not finding fault with Joanna Hogg here – just observing how some critics apply a double standard in these things.

    The other Black character in Part II is a different matter:  Richard Ayoade returns as modish, tantrum-prone film-maker Patrick, who knew Anthony well before Julie did.  Her continuing need to find out more about her dead lover might have served as a pretext for why Patrick has as much screen time as he does.  Instead, he’s mostly seen, and heard, excoriating his crew (Erik Wilson, Alex Robertson, Emyr Glyn Rees, Les Child) – Julie, too, when she insists she likes his work but can’t articulate why – to Patrick’s satisfaction, anyway.  As in the first film, Richard Ayoade proves an accomplished scene-stealer but he’s in too many scenes this time around.  By far the best is the last one in which he appears.   After graduating, Julie bumps into Patrick one night in central London.  He tells her he abandoned his latest project when he was deprived of artistic control and asks, of her graduation piece, ‘Did you resist the temptation to be obvious?’  She feels able to reply honestly that she did.  For once, Patrick is quiet and laconic, as he accepts what she says – and when she brings up the subject of Anthony – or tries to.  ‘Anthony was a drug addict’, Patrick replies, more in sorrow than in anger but conclusively, and goes on his way.

    I expected to miss Tom Burke’s toxic, amusing, charismatic Anthony but missed him less because Hogg makes his absence central to the narrative.  It’s a bit disappointing, though, that, when Burke makes a guest appearance in the climax to Part II, it’s to play a wordless Anthony.  At the public screening of Julie’s graduation film, after the film school head has admitted he and his colleagues were wrong to doubt her and Julie has come to the stage to say a few words, the audience settles down to watch.  (Her proud parents are there, both looking forward to finding out what exactly their daughter has been up to for the last few years.)  What Julie sees, however, and what Hogg shows her audience, is a film fantasy of Julie’s life with Anthony, featuring Burke and, in a variety of costumes, Honor Swinton Byrne.  This is a kind of dream ballet – without the dancing – but more compelling and less interruptive to the narrative proper than traditional dream ballets tended to be.  The sequence is the culmination of the frequently ingenious and beautiful image-making by Hogg and her DP David Raedeker that is a hallmark of the film.

    The exception to Hogg’s eschewal of exact dating of events comes when Julie, in tears, watches television news coverage of the fall of the Berlin Wall.  Part one was definitely set in the mid-1980s, with its references to the IRA bombing of Harrods and the Libyan Embassy siege.  Coming at the very end of the decade, the Wall’s fall might seem to close off the two films neatly as an eighties story but Hogg continues beyond then, illustrating the next stage of Julie’s career, as she goes on to make music videos (as Hogg did in the 1990s) and becomes ever more socially assured.  As soon as she’s able to do so, Julie repays the £10,000 she borrows from her mother earlier in the film.  (It’s a nice touch that Rosalind protests only very briefly before accepting the cheque.)  Just as you’re beginning to wonder if Hogg is uncertain how to end the film, she wraps it up smartly.  The fitting last word – uttered perhaps by an off-screen Julie but more likely by Hogg herself – is ‘Cut!’

    I have to close on my favourite scene of all.  I don’t know why but I’ve always been entertained by screen drama’s obedience to Anton Chekhov’s pistol-on-the-wall dictate[1] in relation to precious ornaments – the convention whereby one character conveys their attachment to, say, a delicate glass vase and another character, who doesn’t share that attachment, duly smashes it.  The sequences involving Julie and her parents in The Souvenir Part II are consistently strong – Tilda Swinton is marvellous and has a splendid partner in James Spencer Ashworth, as her calm, genial farmer husband – but Joanna Hogg’s twist on the glass vase convention is definitely the highlight.  At the breakfast table in her parents’ Norfolk home, Julie surprises her mother by declining the offer of sugar for her coffee, explaining that she no longer takes it.  A few seconds pass before William, quietly amused, tells his daughter, ‘You missed the significance of the bowl’.  In the first film, Rosalind expressed interest in doing a ceramics course as a mature student; she has now duly enrolled and the proffered sugar bowl is the first piece that she’s made.   There’s a bit of light-hearted conversation about Rosalind’s pride in her creation and its ‘Etruscan handles’.  In a later teatime scene between mother and daughter, Rosalind’s three springer spaniels[2] are sniffing round the tray; she asks Julie to move a plate of biscuits and the sugar bowl out of harm’s way, with inevitable results:  Julie misjudges the edge of the mantelpiece and the bowl crashes into the hearth below.  Inevitable but I didn’t see this coming and gasped audibly.

    What follows is so richly credible and true to the three characters concerned that the fate of the sugar bowl turns out to be one of the most brilliant film breakages I can remember seeing.  Julie is distraught and repeatedly apologetic.  Rosalind, although deeply upset, puts a brave face on it and is anxious that the dogs don’t hurt themselves on the shards; she cuts her own finger in the process of removing them.  Best of all are William’s three one-liners, and the trajectory of his well-meant remarks.  Hearing a commotion, he enters the room, sees the damage and exclaims, ‘Oh, not the Etruscan pot!’  A minute or so later, with the debris cleared, he reassures his wife and daughter, ‘Worse things happen at sea’.  Once Rosalind has exited with the dustpan, he confides in Julie, ‘Don’t worry – she can make another one’.

    9 February 2022

    [1] ‘If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.’

    [2] Dora, Rosy and Snowbear – joint winners of the 2021 Palm Dog at Cannes, where the film premiered …

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