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.
