Butcher the Bakkers
Even by the highly dubious standards of Oscarbait biopics whose commercial and awards campaign both hang insistently on one single performance and literally nothing else whatsoever about the film, The Eyes of Tammy Faye is a pretty cruddy movie. Adapted from a 2000 documentary of the same title by screenwriter Abe Sylvia and director Michael Showalter, this is mostly the story of Tammy Faye Messner, née LaValley, but the name under which she became notorious was Tammy Faye Bakker, when she and her husband between 1961 and 1992, Jim Bakker, rose to national prominence as the two gaudiest stars of the great American televangelism boom of the 1970s.
Now, between ourselves, I have an opinion on the Bakkers and their ministry, and it is not a positive one (Jim, beyond a shadow of a doubt, was a shadier, more blatantly immoral character than Tammy Faye ever dreamed of being). But I don't need The Eyes of Tammy Faye to agree with my opinion. What I do need is for it to have any perspective on its protagonists: if not as ethical actors, than at least as the central characters in a feature-length dramatic narrative. And this would appear to be beyond the grasp of this particular film, which cannot make the most basic decisions about what to do with the Bakkers. Do we like them? Do we like her, but not him? Are we laughing nastily with them, as anti-heroes? Are we booing them, as villains? All of them, depending on where we are in the film. And what of the tone: is it a comedy, or a serious character drama? Given the most salient feature of the Bakkers, and Tammy Faye in particular, was their overly processed, plasticky appearance and performance style, and in later years the cocoon of makeup she wore for all public appearances, is this to be campy? Satiric? Somehow, against all odds, sincere? Or just trashy?
Not one of those questions has been given a single answer that covers the entire 126 minutes of this rudderless film. Showalter's trade has mostly been in comedy, going back to his days as a cast member on the '90s cult sketch comedy series The State, and one can perpetually feel him straining to make The Eyes of Tammy Faye, if not exactly a "comedy", at least founded in the kind of exaggeration and manic energy from which comedy has been known to spring. Certainly, it goes very big, nowhere moreso than in the central performances: the roles of Tammy Faye and Jim are filled here by Jessica Chastain (also producing) and Andrew Garfield, and they are both going all-out. It's hard not to have one's reaction to the film exist primarily as a reaction to these performances, not least since "are we going to get Chastain that Oscar, finally?" was clearly a big part of the conversation when the movie was coming together, and for myself, I found the performances very... much. If pressed, I would probably say that Garfield seems to be making his decisions with slightly more restraint and consideration than his co-star, though only by a slender margin, and not in every scene (indeed, almost exclusively in a cluster of scenes around the one-quarter mark, as the action starts to accelerate from the first into the second act).
Mostly, they make for a pretty finely-matched set, both of them embracing all of the surface-level tics of their real-life counterparts, and it just happens to be the case that Tammy Faye was, I guess, "ticcier". Particularly in her native Minnesotan accent, which Chastain attacks with great joy and obvious pleasure, and almost no sense of nuance at all. Chastain's Tammy Faye goes through an extremely straightforward, streamlined arc over the course of the movie: first she is gleefully optimistic, then she is gleefully optimistic and stubborn, then she is sad. If there's one point where the film and actor clearly shade some delicacy into this, it's when Tammy Faye finds herself outraged that, at something of a barbecue summit of televangelist thought leaders including Pat Robertson (Gabriel Olds) and Jerry Falwell (Vincent D'Onofrio), the table of power is populated exclusively by men, and so she charges like a bull right in with an extra-syrupy version of her chipper can-do personality. It's one of the only places in the film where we get a clear sense that Tammy Faye is consciously performing her outward-facing attitude, and it's gratifyingly layered. It's hard not to suspect that Chastain, whose career has become increasingly bogged down in philosophically dubious Girlboss Feminist types, wanted to put a little more effort into this moment, since it's one of the key scenes in the film advancing its insane notion that Tammy Faye was and should be admired as a feminist trailblazer and gay-rights activist within the arch-reactionary world of conservative Evangelical Christianity. At a minimum, Chastain's performance is all but completely free of any indication that Tammy Faye was anything but a nice lady who got a rougher deal in life than she deserved - Garfield at least gets to play Jim as a whiny egotist whose beaming smile oozes oily smarm.
The one exception is that she's awfully willing to play Tammy Faye as a sheltered country rube, and thus the butt of jokes that the film is never precisely making. Again, The Eyes of Tammy Faye isn't exactly a comedy and isn't exactly a tragedy. It's probably closer to being successful in the former mode, with its bouncy energy and caricatured lead performances, but the arc of the plot is towards heavier and grimmer material. And this holds even as the film soft-pedals the exact nature of Jim's various ethical malfeasances, burying much of its actual narrative in a long chain of montages whereby the Bakkers' rise to prominence and then their condemnation in the media are both covered as a series of half-formed impressions. There's a lot of "wants to have it all ways" going on: it wants to present the couple at the height of their tackiness and wealth, a pair of minimally talented hucksters enjoying the fruits of their hucksterism, so it just fast-forwards to that point; it wants to tell a story about a marriage decaying, so it fast-forwards to that. It proceeds with a herky-jerky rhythm that leaves us with no real sense of who the characters are, other than garish types, and fundamentally fails to have any perspective on Christianity in their lives, or in the society at large.
This last part is particularly rough, since as written, it's the core of Tammy Faye's character. Chastain either doesn't notice this, doesn't care, or just can't carry it off: she's playing the surface level "I love Jesus so much, let's sing a hymn!" energy of Tammy Faye, but not once in the entire movie did I get the impression that she was actually playing a woman who actually felt driven by her faith (neither does Garfield, but the film's conception of Jim allows it to get away with that). And this is very much something the film thinks is happening, so its absence is just one more way this feels hollow.
This all the worse since the film has a performance right there performing the arc that Tammy Faye is supposed to be undergoing: Cherry Jones, playing Tammy Faye's mother, who goes from stern, moralistic doubt of her daughter's embrace of showmanship, to guiltily enjoying the presents that all that wealth entails. In just a handful of scenes, Jones brings in all of the nuance that a film about religious hypocrisy needs to be actually challenging and not just glib. There's only one other performance that can compare with it: D'Onofrio's Falwell is crabby and domineering and tired of the bozos he's thrown in with, but you can also see in it the gruff charisma that made him, for a long time, the single most influential religious figure in American culture and politics. He's a lazy bully, but he exercises such effortless control over all of his scenes that we get the feeling of Falwell's authority without the film having to do anything blunt to put it over. And he, too, is only in a handful of scenes.
Absent those two figures, The Eyes of Tammy Faye has no interesting humans, and there's nothing else about it that's filling the gap. The filmmaking is never better than functional, and at times less than that: there are multiple scenes that have slack, sloppy editing (the 180-degree line is crossed in an exceptionally visible way at one point), and while the overall pace of the film blazes too quickly through 30 years in the characters' lives, every individual scene seems to unfold with almost no forward momentum at all. It's shot without any interesting visual ideas, except for a moment that we see the Bakkers on a TV monitor, and then see them up close, and this doesn't really tell us anything about what it means for them to be on television. It's just a different way of doing an establishing shot. Overall, the whole thing is perfunctory: so perfunctory that I don't know how it can end up with such a sludgy, shapeless midsection, since the whole point of formula is to give you guard rails. At any rate, it's one of the most "reasons we hate biopics" biopics in a while, so it's only right for it to have met with the precise quantity of Oscar attention it so nakedly desired.
Now, between ourselves, I have an opinion on the Bakkers and their ministry, and it is not a positive one (Jim, beyond a shadow of a doubt, was a shadier, more blatantly immoral character than Tammy Faye ever dreamed of being). But I don't need The Eyes of Tammy Faye to agree with my opinion. What I do need is for it to have any perspective on its protagonists: if not as ethical actors, than at least as the central characters in a feature-length dramatic narrative. And this would appear to be beyond the grasp of this particular film, which cannot make the most basic decisions about what to do with the Bakkers. Do we like them? Do we like her, but not him? Are we laughing nastily with them, as anti-heroes? Are we booing them, as villains? All of them, depending on where we are in the film. And what of the tone: is it a comedy, or a serious character drama? Given the most salient feature of the Bakkers, and Tammy Faye in particular, was their overly processed, plasticky appearance and performance style, and in later years the cocoon of makeup she wore for all public appearances, is this to be campy? Satiric? Somehow, against all odds, sincere? Or just trashy?
Not one of those questions has been given a single answer that covers the entire 126 minutes of this rudderless film. Showalter's trade has mostly been in comedy, going back to his days as a cast member on the '90s cult sketch comedy series The State, and one can perpetually feel him straining to make The Eyes of Tammy Faye, if not exactly a "comedy", at least founded in the kind of exaggeration and manic energy from which comedy has been known to spring. Certainly, it goes very big, nowhere moreso than in the central performances: the roles of Tammy Faye and Jim are filled here by Jessica Chastain (also producing) and Andrew Garfield, and they are both going all-out. It's hard not to have one's reaction to the film exist primarily as a reaction to these performances, not least since "are we going to get Chastain that Oscar, finally?" was clearly a big part of the conversation when the movie was coming together, and for myself, I found the performances very... much. If pressed, I would probably say that Garfield seems to be making his decisions with slightly more restraint and consideration than his co-star, though only by a slender margin, and not in every scene (indeed, almost exclusively in a cluster of scenes around the one-quarter mark, as the action starts to accelerate from the first into the second act).
Mostly, they make for a pretty finely-matched set, both of them embracing all of the surface-level tics of their real-life counterparts, and it just happens to be the case that Tammy Faye was, I guess, "ticcier". Particularly in her native Minnesotan accent, which Chastain attacks with great joy and obvious pleasure, and almost no sense of nuance at all. Chastain's Tammy Faye goes through an extremely straightforward, streamlined arc over the course of the movie: first she is gleefully optimistic, then she is gleefully optimistic and stubborn, then she is sad. If there's one point where the film and actor clearly shade some delicacy into this, it's when Tammy Faye finds herself outraged that, at something of a barbecue summit of televangelist thought leaders including Pat Robertson (Gabriel Olds) and Jerry Falwell (Vincent D'Onofrio), the table of power is populated exclusively by men, and so she charges like a bull right in with an extra-syrupy version of her chipper can-do personality. It's one of the only places in the film where we get a clear sense that Tammy Faye is consciously performing her outward-facing attitude, and it's gratifyingly layered. It's hard not to suspect that Chastain, whose career has become increasingly bogged down in philosophically dubious Girlboss Feminist types, wanted to put a little more effort into this moment, since it's one of the key scenes in the film advancing its insane notion that Tammy Faye was and should be admired as a feminist trailblazer and gay-rights activist within the arch-reactionary world of conservative Evangelical Christianity. At a minimum, Chastain's performance is all but completely free of any indication that Tammy Faye was anything but a nice lady who got a rougher deal in life than she deserved - Garfield at least gets to play Jim as a whiny egotist whose beaming smile oozes oily smarm.
The one exception is that she's awfully willing to play Tammy Faye as a sheltered country rube, and thus the butt of jokes that the film is never precisely making. Again, The Eyes of Tammy Faye isn't exactly a comedy and isn't exactly a tragedy. It's probably closer to being successful in the former mode, with its bouncy energy and caricatured lead performances, but the arc of the plot is towards heavier and grimmer material. And this holds even as the film soft-pedals the exact nature of Jim's various ethical malfeasances, burying much of its actual narrative in a long chain of montages whereby the Bakkers' rise to prominence and then their condemnation in the media are both covered as a series of half-formed impressions. There's a lot of "wants to have it all ways" going on: it wants to present the couple at the height of their tackiness and wealth, a pair of minimally talented hucksters enjoying the fruits of their hucksterism, so it just fast-forwards to that point; it wants to tell a story about a marriage decaying, so it fast-forwards to that. It proceeds with a herky-jerky rhythm that leaves us with no real sense of who the characters are, other than garish types, and fundamentally fails to have any perspective on Christianity in their lives, or in the society at large.
This last part is particularly rough, since as written, it's the core of Tammy Faye's character. Chastain either doesn't notice this, doesn't care, or just can't carry it off: she's playing the surface level "I love Jesus so much, let's sing a hymn!" energy of Tammy Faye, but not once in the entire movie did I get the impression that she was actually playing a woman who actually felt driven by her faith (neither does Garfield, but the film's conception of Jim allows it to get away with that). And this is very much something the film thinks is happening, so its absence is just one more way this feels hollow.
This all the worse since the film has a performance right there performing the arc that Tammy Faye is supposed to be undergoing: Cherry Jones, playing Tammy Faye's mother, who goes from stern, moralistic doubt of her daughter's embrace of showmanship, to guiltily enjoying the presents that all that wealth entails. In just a handful of scenes, Jones brings in all of the nuance that a film about religious hypocrisy needs to be actually challenging and not just glib. There's only one other performance that can compare with it: D'Onofrio's Falwell is crabby and domineering and tired of the bozos he's thrown in with, but you can also see in it the gruff charisma that made him, for a long time, the single most influential religious figure in American culture and politics. He's a lazy bully, but he exercises such effortless control over all of his scenes that we get the feeling of Falwell's authority without the film having to do anything blunt to put it over. And he, too, is only in a handful of scenes.
Absent those two figures, The Eyes of Tammy Faye has no interesting humans, and there's nothing else about it that's filling the gap. The filmmaking is never better than functional, and at times less than that: there are multiple scenes that have slack, sloppy editing (the 180-degree line is crossed in an exceptionally visible way at one point), and while the overall pace of the film blazes too quickly through 30 years in the characters' lives, every individual scene seems to unfold with almost no forward momentum at all. It's shot without any interesting visual ideas, except for a moment that we see the Bakkers on a TV monitor, and then see them up close, and this doesn't really tell us anything about what it means for them to be on television. It's just a different way of doing an establishing shot. Overall, the whole thing is perfunctory: so perfunctory that I don't know how it can end up with such a sludgy, shapeless midsection, since the whole point of formula is to give you guard rails. At any rate, it's one of the most "reasons we hate biopics" biopics in a while, so it's only right for it to have met with the precise quantity of Oscar attention it so nakedly desired.
