Formula: Big Eyes - Death to Smoochy
I remember Tammy Faye Bakker about the normal amount for someone my age. I'm slightly too young to know the PTL Network scandals. By the time I came of age, she was just that weird lady with the makeup. I grew a late appreciation for her when, for whatever reason, I watched the season of The Surreal Life with her in 2004. She's one of those people who couldn't be real. I think she was authentic. I don't think she was putting on an act. She's like Joe Exotic or the guy from Grizzly Man: a person so unique that no one could capture her essence. These are people who actors salivate at the chance to figure them out but ultimately fail almost every time. Remember how silly Joseph Gordon Levitt was in The Walk despite not actually doing a bad Phillippe Petit impression? This is why I'm not looking forward to the upcoming Joe Exotic series. It's why I'm glad that no one has tried to make a Grizzly Man biopic.
In its chief goal, The Eyes of Tammy Faye is a success. The Tammy Faye Bakker biopic has Jessica Chastain giving a huge yet fair and shaded performance. That is a huge achievement, because it would be so easy to let that character get away from her or to be inauthentic about her. The film gives her just enough knowing glances throughout that she seems human yet she misses enough to be believably delusional. Jessica Chastain is the undeniable good thing in the movie.
The rest of the movie I didn't care for. First of all, I hoped we were past the "full life biopic" era. It's too much to cover and so much is short-changed as a result. The movie starts with Tammy Faye as a young girl, who deeply wants god's love but can't go to church because her mother remarried and I guess Tammy Faye is a bastard. She grows up and attends bible college where she meets Jim Bakker (Andrew Garfield), an aspiring minister who believes that loving god doesn't have to mean forsaking wealth. They get hitched and hit the road as travelling ministers. Over decades, they move up the ranks of televangelists until they have the largest Christian network on TV before falling to scandal and misappropriation of funds. To fit all that in, they had to leave so much out. I want to know way more at virtually every point of the movie. What were those early years on the road like? How did they go from CBN to TBN to PTL? How did the Praise the Lord Network grow so much? The first half of the movie runs through so much plot that I never got a good understanding of their situation. To be clear: I'm not asking for more movie. It's already too long. I'm asking for more focus.
That ties into some of my other issues with the movie. There was no grounding in this movie. A common critique I have about movies is that I don't believe the characters exist off the screen. That is incredibly true of The Eyes of Tammy Faye. Jim is a swindler from the opening moments of his first scene. I have no idea how that character in that movie could've grown an empire like PTL. A lot of that has to do with the film not liking him or any other character than Tammy Faye. The movie is shot like a comedy (and promoted like one) but it's not. It's a drama played by cartoon people. It feels like director Michael Showalter sways between feeling contempt and pity for the characters. There's no attempt to understand them as people. As a result, Andrew Garfield has nothing to work with. He's just a weasel. An uninteresting weasel. It's a good impression of Jim Bakker but a bad character. It even gets in the way of Chastain's performance. The movie can never figure out just how much Tammy Faye is aware of things. At times, she's too stupid to notice. At other times, she's lying to herself. The remaining times, she's the mastermind who makes the whole enterprise work.
I'm not saying I know what the right answer is to make this movie work. As I said at the beginning, I think Tammy Faye Bakker is the kind of character who can't be understood in a two-hour movie. This was probably doomed from the start. But I don't think the best efforts were made to make the movie work. There can't be this much disdain for everyone in the movie. Not to mention all the places where a time jump skips right by the hardest parts to explain. Even the end has a hard time landing. Tammy Faye post-scandal is the first time we see her in the real world. Even then there's no reckoning. She's a punchline without it being clear how much she deserves it. Chastain no doubt deserves awards attention for how nearly she made this work, but this movie is a misfire everywhere else.
Verdict: Strongly Don't Recommend
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