Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 2 hours, 6 minutes
Director: Michael Showalter
Quick Impressions:
We saw this movie in the theater! On a Friday night! With other people! Not too many other people, thankfully. That’s one reason I love that theater. It’s usually sparsely populated. Also, they show the movies I’m most excited to see. And they give us free popcorn almost every single time we go! I’m convinced this happens by magic. (Or maybe we just racked up a lot of reward points in the past by seeing at least one movie every single week.)
“Of course, we won’t get free popcorn tonight,” my husband said wisely, “because we haven’t been to a movie in a year and a half!”
That’s true. Until Friday night, the last movie we’d seen in the theater was The Hunt in March 2020 (and we almost didn’t go to that one! Everything was getting so scary and uncertain. In the end, we only risked it because we had already bought the tickets online).
But I was so excited to be back in a movie theater that I was more than willing to pay for our popcorn (especially because we skipped dinner to shorten our time away from home).
Guess what though? While ringing us up, the concessions worker announced, “Good news! You have a free birthday popcorn!” (As we walked into the auditorium, I whispered excitedly to my husband, “And we might get another free popcorn next time because I’ve had two birthdays since last time we were here!”)
What lured us back out to the theater after all this time? Well, it’s where the movies are playing, you see. Every year, I watch and write about as many Oscar nominated films and performances as I can. This year, most of them won’t be conveniently streaming in my bedroom, and it’s already mid-October. The pandemic radically changed our movie viewing habits, but I decided it was time to change them back. Life is change, but there’s no reason to abandon my former hobbies for the rest of eternity.
For months now, I’ve assumed that the film that would greet us on our return to theaters would be Dune (which I have been dying to see since I heard Timothée Chalamet was cast in an adaptation directed by Denis Villeneuve. And you can be sure that I will see Dune on the big screen as soon as I possibly can). I never expected to come back for The Eyes of Tammy Faye. To be embarrassingly frank, I hadn’t even heard of the film until last week. Normally I follow the Oscars obsessively closely. Not this year.
I bought tickets to this because 1) Jessica Chastain’s been getting some Oscar buzz for her lead performance, and 2) It was playing in Austin. That was (literally, truly) all I knew about the film going in.
Well, I mean, I assumed it was about Tammy Faye Bakker/Messner. (The titular eyes seemed like kind of a clue there, and, of course, Jessica Chastain would be getting Oscar buzz for playing that Tammy Faye! It’s very unlikely casting.) (Jessica Chastain movie titles have fooled me before, though. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby isn’t necessarily a must-see for Beatles fans.)
I think the barista at the coffee place Friday afternoon was pretty surprised that we weren’t seeing Halloween Kills, No Time to Die, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, or Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Or maybe she was just surprised that I knew so little about the movie I planned to see, including a coherent reason why I was going. (Or maybe she just thought it was funny to keep prolonging our conversation because my daughter’s reactions to my increasing awkwardness entertained her. Our coffee had been ready for two hours, as far as I know!)
The Good:
I went in thinking I wasn’t too interested in Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, and this movie surprised me by presenting them sympathetically (especially Tammy Faye) and making me care about their story. That’s quite an accomplishment. (When I heard Jessica Chastain was getting Oscar buzz for playing Tammy Faye, I thought, “No wonder! That’s quite a transformation!” But I never thought, “Well, of course! That’s the role every actress dreams of! It’s about time somebody made a Tammy Faye Bakker biopic!”) I didn’t think I needed a movie about the Bakkers, but I was wrong. I found this story not only quite engaging but surprisingly edifying, as well.
What’s best about it is that instead of dragging Tammy Faye Bakker further through the mud (and I think she was dragged far enough in the 90s), the film instead decides to reveal to us how she yearned for God to use her to show people His goodness. If we believe what she says early in the film, Tammy Faye wanted to use her life as a witness to bring people to Christ. And if Christians watch this movie, they will see that happening. The film could be a dramatization of the words of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew. When she exalts herself, she’s humbled (to an extreme). But once she’s been humbled (and found humility), then she’s exalted. Her life story is powerful, and Christians who watch will see God using her for His purpose. (Once she has been completely destroyed, she is so immensely compelling, and she had to live through an entire lifetime’s rise in order for that to happen. It is a strangely captivating story.)
Now, if you’re not watching this movie thinking, “I hope Tammy Faye Bakker leads me to Christ,” that’s fine, too. In fact, that’s normal. (I wasn’t thinking that when I watched, either! Who in their right mind, familiar with the Bakkers from their past scandals would go in thinking that? Thoughts like that only began to occur to me near the end of the film.)
Before seeing this, I would have expected any successful movie about the Bakkers to be an exposé or, perhaps, a defense. The Eyes of Tammy Faye is neither. It’s more an invitation to shift our perspective. It gives Jessica Chastain (and the make-up artists) a great, meaty role. And it plays like the life story of any talented entertainer. People tend not to have much sympathy for fallen televangelists, but this film gives us a Tammy Faye who seems to have a lot in common with beloved biopic subjects like Judy Garland, Billie Holiday, Elton John, Freddie Mercury, Ray Charles, Johnny Cash. Everybody loves them.
If you’ve followed the Oscars even casually in recent years, you’ve seen innumerable successful movies about talented entertainers whose lives go spiraling wildly out of control, and this film presents Tammy Faye Bakker as one of them.
Jim Bakker then becomes the abusive/incompetent manager/spouse who loses her assets, encourages her drug addiction, takes advantage of her talent, leaves her in the dark about everything, leads her down a dark spiral, and abandons her at the bottom.
Tammy Faye comes out of this looking really sympathetic because the movie gives her the star treatment. Audiences are conditioned to respond to this (oft-used) formula. Tammy Faye is the Judy Garland/Billie Holiday, et al. of this movie, so we know how to react to her. We’ve seen so many movies like this that we’ve been trained to feel sympathy for the talented, hard-working, vulnerable artist, taken advantage of and destroyed by those who should have protected her.
“I didn’t even know Tammy Faye Bakker could sing!” my husband noted in surprise after the movie.
And I chimed in, “Neither did I! In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever heard her sing once!” (I’m not used to Chastain singing either. I didn’t know she has such a good voice. That’s another reason she would deserve an Oscar nomination for her performance. She sings so many songs.)
Fairly or not, I always thought of the Bakkers primarily as shifty flim-flam artists who contributed nothing positive to society and conned gullible, vulnerable people out of millions of dollars. As far as I knew from the media, the Bakkers were parasitic thieves who kept themselves in the spotlight but produced nothing of value, taking people’s money and giving them nothing in return. But this movie gives us Tammy Faye the (hard working!) entertainer. Basically, she and Jim have a successful 70s/80s variety show, not so different from many others. It’s just that the theme of theirs is God. The film’s emphasis on their commitment to entertaining their audience really challenged the way I’ve always thought of the Bakkers before. (In this film, we see them providing the type of infotainment now offered by 24-hour news channels. I’ve never conceived of televangelism in quite that way before.)
As someone who grew up in the 80s and 90s, I was far more familiar with grotesque parodies of the (in)famous televangelist couple than with the real people and their actual work. Until now, Tammy Faye’s make-up made far more of a lasting impression on me than her actual face or any of her accomplishments. (I never thought of her as having accomplishments!)
In the 80s and 90s, you’d stand in line at the grocery store, glance at the tabloids, and see that all the usual scandals were continuing as expected. Charles was cheating on Diana; Diana was cheating on Charles; the Bakkers were swindling their congregants; Jim was in a motel room somewhere with a (possibly male) prostitute; Tammy Faye was crying; her eye make-up was all over her face and the front page of The National Enquirer.
Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker were household names, yes, but until I watched this film, not only did it never once occur to me to take them seriously myself, but it never even occurred to me that anyone had ever taken them seriously. People did, though. Apparently, their PTL Network raised ridiculous amounts of money and had way more viewers than probably any network in 2021. Before seeing this film, I never once thought of the Bakkers as being successful. But you can’t fall from the bottom. I don’t know why it never occurred to me before that huge numbers of people must have loved them and sincerely felt closer to God when worshipping with them.
When I was younger, my parents’ take on televangelists was not positive. In fact, though we were quite involved in church when I was growing up, I didn’t know anyone who took televangelists seriously. (My family did think highly of Billy Graham. Does he count? And I do remember my mom sometimes speaking positively about Robert Schuller, but that, I think, was mostly because she liked to wow me with trivia about the Crystal Cathedral. Now radio ministers were a different matter. Both my mom and my grandpa frequently read Donald Grey Barnhouse, J. Vernon McGee, and, of course, C.S. Lewis. But anyone mainly on TV was considered very sketchy.)
In the 1980s, we attended the same church (as in denomination) that both my parents grew up in, the Independent Christian Church (one of three major denominations that grew out of the Restorationist movement, started by Thomas and Alexander Campbell). My parents took their faith very seriously. (My mom’s dad was an elder, and my dad’s dad was a minister.) Later when I was a teenager, we switched to the Disciples of Christ Church (another Restorationist denomination. The third is Church of Christ, the people who don’t believe in using instrumental music). (As an adult, I became Catholic, and my parents followed me.)
Although we knew some people who got swept into various crazes that televangelists were pushing, my parents were never interested in any of that. The big one I remember is the Turmoil in the Toybox movement, and I remember that one because it said all the cartoons I watched were evil. Care Bears and He-Man were supposed to be transforming me into a New Aged Satanist, which my mother found absurd. (I suppose when your young daughter is already freely telling the minister, “I want to be a witch like Tabitha,” being exposed to the Care Bear Stare can’t make things much worse.) (I know the point of contention was actually that sinister talking book in The Care Bears Movie, but she’s the villain! A serious question I had even then—if you believe seeing a hero experience temptation or peril is damaging to children, how do you justify letting them read about Jesus? But I’m getting a bit sidetracked.)
My point is, because I never watched the Bakkers, I just assumed the “crazy” things they taught were like all the other “crazy” over-the-top movements I’d heard about. That was quite unfair on my part. Somehow, despite my familiarity with their names and faces (because who didn’t know them?), I had no idea they were charismatics. (That probably explains why Tammy Faye’s crying was always emphasized by those mocking her.) (It also explains why no one I knew in the Independent Christian church thought too highly of them.)
What I found so interesting about this movie is that although my parents always gave every impression of thinking the Bakkers were pretty nuts, in the beginning of the film, Jim and Tammy Faye are actually a lot like my parents who spent a huge chunk of my childhood (like, the whole thing) trying to teach children the gospel through songs, stories, and really interactive Sunday School techniques. If I had asked my mom and dad, “What do you have in common with Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker?” they would have answered, “Nothing!” But they would have been wrong.
Jessica Chastain is riveting as Tammy Faye. Her performance alone is reason enough to watch the movie. (As of now, I hope she does get nominated for an Oscar, but, keep in mind, I haven’t seen her competition yet.)
What surprised me was how spot on Andrew Garfield is as a young Jim Bakker. He’s eerily like the real Jim Bakker (until the very end of the movie when he still seems like a young Jim Bakker, just made up to look older). In some respects, the character is well written, too. Right from the start, Jim establishes himself as someone who makes terrible choices, does awful things, and is just really, really, really so gosh darn sorry about it (but is also probably still doing it right now while he’s confessing it to you). (In some aspects, though, I find his character development lacking. I’ll get to that later.)
Cherry Jones is also a standout as Tammy Faye’s mother. If Chastain does get nominated, I hope Jones does, too. (But this is the only movie I’ve seen so far this fall, so I wouldn’t count on that.) (With this mother character, the film really surprised me because I thought it was setting her up as a sort of villain in the beginning, and then she turns out to be a kind, loving mother, after all.)
Most Oscar Worthy Moment, Jessica Chastain:
When I asked my husband his favorite scene after the movie, it was the same as mine. After Tammy Faye’s second child is born, she has a bit of a breakdown (which her husband tries to play off as just one of those things that happens to women even though he’s the one who directly caused it). Jim invites a potential investor over to the house to pitch him his wonderful and not at all bizarre idea of a Christian themed amusement park (complete with a replica of the Temple, the Colosseum, and I think waterslides?). He needs the investor to commit because he desperately needs the money. He’s already sold a bunch of shares and used every bit of that money for something else.
Meanwhile Tammy Faye is skulking around in the background hating him and being high on prescription medication. Then at the last second, she decides to help Jim instead by becoming very charming. Chastain absolutely shines in this moment. So much happens so quickly, and it’s all happening inside her head. (It’s hard not to admire Tammy Faye herself here, too. She’s very gifted, and she knows it.)
Best Scene:
This movie features several scenes that work well in tandem with others. One of them comes when Tammy Faye buys her mother a coat and very sweetly instructs everyone to tell her she looks so beautiful in it because no one has paid her enough compliments in her life.
The coat is returned to Tammy Faye later in the film, in a way that’s so touching both my husband and I cried.
Another sequence of scenes that is extremely effective shows us that Jim and Tammy Faye love encouraging each other to make bold, unconventional choices. This keeps happening over and over again. And at first it seems like a good thing. Then they reach a tipping point and just spiral off into craziness. They’re very charming together when they first meet in Bible college, and Tammy Faye is so good at encouraging Jim to use his talents. Then later when they go to a party at Pat Robertson’s house, they see that he’s building himself a golden palace with the money that they’re bringing in for him. What they choose to do in response to that is sort of interesting.
Best Scene Visually:
There’s a great late moment in which Tammy Faye performs “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” backed by a choir that only she can see. The performance (with her imagined embellishments) actually reminds me of a real musical number I once saw at a friend’s church on the Fourth of July. (By this point, it’s very hard not to like Tammy Faye. Her courage is so admirable, and so is her willingness to own her identity and all the shame it’s brought her. She proudly wears those familiar false eyelashes like a scarlet letter. Whatever she is, she’s herself.)
Best Action Sequence:
One the best moments in the entire film comes when Tammy Faye pointedly (in what the film presents as an act of calculated defiance) interviews an AIDS patient on air and treats him with dignity, respect, and love.
He’s a real person and still alive, and this is the kind of moment that makes you think, “Whatever else Tammy Faye Bakker did, she did that.” I never even knew about this side of Tammy Faye. I’ve read now that despite her embrace by the gay community late in her life, some people suspect that she didn’t truly accept homosexuality, that she simply believed in treating every human being with dignity and love. (They don’t seem to have any evidence of that, though.) Either way, to (even metaphorically) embrace a gay man suffering from AIDS is a very shocking move for a Christian televangelist at that time, and she was brave to do it. The way Jerry Falwell, Sr. (played here by Vincent D’Onofrio), is represented in this film is entirely consistent with everything I’ve ever known of him, and I think that most of the evangelical community at that time shared those (strongly anti-gay) beliefs. My own parents wouldn’t have been so accepting. (Well, I mean, they’re nice people. They would treat everyone with respect.) But in the faith tradition they were raised in, homosexuality was most definitely a sin (a set of disordered behaviors, not an identity). To show any level of acknowledgement and acceptance is a very surprising and tremendously courageous thing for a Christian televangelist to do in the 1980s.
The Negatives:
I do worry I’m a bit too taken with Tammy Faye (to the point of being taken in by her), and I think it’s Chastain’s performance that wins me over. As a child, the character stirs pity, but there’s also something unsettling about the early scenes of this film when Tammy experiences a much desired miracle that looks like something that would happen to a young Joan of Arc in Luc Besson’s The Messenger. The film’s early scenes made me uneasy, in fact. The family seems abusive. The child is clearly disturbed.
But once Chastain shows up, she acquires this winning “I just want to sing!” quality, and it’s hard not to root for her because she is entertaining, and she’s definitely working for the money she gets. What she does isn’t easy. It takes tenacity and talent, so it’s really impossible to root against her. But the movie glosses over so much. Can we really believe that Tammy Faye (who is demonstrably intelligent and appears to be the driving force in her marriage) is truly so oblivious to what’s really going on with the empire she’s helping to build?
It’s very convenient to blame Jim for everything because you want to ask her, “Why do you buy so many material things? Where do you think that money is coming from?” But it’s so hard to hold her accountable because when you try to pin her down, she’s there gushing, “I just want to sing!” It’s really hard not to like that energy. Even if you corner her and demand, “Why are you spending so much money on fur coats, though, Tammy Faye?” she’ll just ask, “Why doesn’t my husband love me?” Then she’ll go on to say, “I know God loves me. I know because I see God’s love in the smiling faces of the audience every time I sing.” And then she’ll start to sing. (And I mean, she is an engaging performer.)
So it’s very hard to hold her accountable for anything, but that doesn’t mean that she deserves to get off the hook so easily for all of her (borderline criminal) behavior throughout her entire adult life. I mean, like I said, she has kind of a Judy Garland type quality (especially the way this film presents her to us), but Judy Garland never started a cult. (I guess it’s not a cult, but they’re taking all this money from people to build an empire that’s only purpose is to take more money from people. At best, it’s a pyramid scheme. (Aren’t they even building the pyramids in their amusement park?) (If they’re not, they’re missing a golden opportunity.) I feel if my husband were doing that on such a scale, I would notice, and I’m pretty out of it, generally.) (Of course, I just compared her to Judy Garland. It is very to easy to believe that Judy Garland’s husband would destroy her finances behind her back.)
And it’s very easy (almost too easy) not to be mad at Tammy Faye because Jim is just so much worse. (When he makes her apologize to everyone on air as a way of raising money, my husband and I were so enraged.) Actually, I wish we got more insight into Jim Bakker because it’s clear that somehow something goes drastically wrong with Jim and Tammy Faye’s ministry. They begin as true believers genuinely eager to share the gospel and win hearts for Christ, and then all of a sudden, they’re buying endless fur coats and sinking money into shady real estate developments. (We watch it happen. But it’s just so hard to believe that there isn’t more to the story.) (I guess it’s not a crime to buy fur coats and live in your own house. But what’s Tammy Faye doing all the rest of the time? Just singing all the time? If so, I guess she really did earn those coats.) (It’s weird, though. I feel like more should be happening.)
They Bakkers begin their married and professional life in a way that reminds me a bit of my young parents teaching Sunday School together. But time passes, and they’ve suddenly become crooked real estate moguls having a garish, non-stop telethon. (My dad’s dad was a minister, and from him, my dad borrowed a phrase, “The church of what’s happenin’ now,” i.e. a church that didn’t teach the gospel so much as encourage people to revel in trendy, fun, morally lax fads. (I now discover my grandpa may have stolen the phrase from Flip Wilson.) The prosperity theology the Bakkers seem to encourage is exactly the sort of thing that would have drawn my Grandpa Ernie’s ire.) (Of course, he would have been suspicious of them just for being charismatics. He didn’t approve of Catholics, either. He wouldn’t even come to my wedding.) But I know he would have been disgusted by the Bakkers’ seeming prosperity theology (and probably by the penis pumps, too). I wish I had paid better attention back in 1990, so I had a clearer understanding of just what exactly their actual crimes were.
Honestly, if you’re like me, you’ll come out of this movie really liking Tammy Faye Bakker. She came from nothing and managed (through tenacity and talent) to become enormously famous. And she seemed to try to help people whenever she could. Whether she’s misdirected or not (in life, I mean, not in this movie), she’s such a compelling figure. You watch and think, “Yes, there should be a movie about you. Why did I never realize that before? You’re something else.”
But what is going on with Jim? Maybe most of the scandal really wasn’t Tammy Faye’s fault. (She’s not the one who went to prison, after all.) But why did Jim do the things that he did? The movie seems to suggest that he was secretly gay but unable to come to terms with that because he needed Jerry Falwell to like him, and so, as a result…he had to commit real estate fraud? (That doesn’t make much sense to me. Can you image being arrested for shady real estate deals and insisting, “Well I had to do that because I was secretly gay at the time.”) But it really seems like that’s what the movie’s getting at (especially with that wrestling scene). (Or maybe the movie just hits that so hard because Tammy Faye is so disgusted by Falwell?) I don’t know.
Also, where do their children go? (I know they continued to exist because Tammy Sue Bakker sings a very catchy version of “Don’t Give Up (on the Brink of a Miracle)” over the closing credits.) (I cannot get that song out of my head.) Is the movie just cautious about showing them because they’re still alive and might sue? Jim Bakker is still alive, too. Except for one significant scene with Tammy Sue (that moment with the coat), the kids practically vanish the moment they’re born.
This may not be the best movie for understanding how the Bakkers’ ministry got so off track, but it is quite a showcase for Jessica Chastain, and a more rousing tribute to Tammy Faye Bakker than I ever had any idea she deserved. I’m glad that it introduced me to her.
Overall:
Jessica Chastain makes Tammy Faye Baker far more compelling than I ever imagined she could be, to the point that I’m now interested in researching the actual woman’s life. Maybe Chastain will finally win an Oscar for this. And maybe I’ll go to the movies again next week and see if I get another free birthday popcorn.