The Eyes of Tammy Faye ends – spoiler alert (?) – with a campy musical sequence in which the heroine of the title belts out The Battle Hymn of the Republic through mascara tears.
This choral denouement is something of a swerve for a project that works awfully hard to sit on its jazz hands. Everything about the late Tammy Faye screams “Cameo on a cartoon wool cloud in a John Waters movie”, but this biopic sidesteps kitsch in favour of the soulful humanisation of the late wife of disgraced preacher Jim Bakker.
Factor in feathery bed linen, fur coats, industrial-grade eyeshadow, and a director best-known for comedies (The Big Sick) and it’s a Battle Hymn for the soul of the movie.
In common with I, Tonya, Abe Sylvia’s screenplay strives to reinvent the big 1980s punchline of the title as a woman making her way in a man’s man’s world in extravagant costumes. Taking an almost cradle-to-grave approach, the narrative introduces passionate Christian Tammy Faye Grover as a child who speaks in tongues and who, as an adult (Jessica Chastain), meets and falls in love with fellow student Jim Bakker (Andrew Garfield) at Bible college.
The two marry, much to the disapproval of Tammy’s momma (Cherry Jones), and become nomadic preachers, with Jim on the lectern and Tammy singing with hand-made puppets.
When they land a gig on Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), Jim and Tammy are springboarded into a new burgeoning class of tax-avoiding televangelists. But Tammy’s openness and tolerance for the LGBTQ community during the Aids crisis puts her at odds with the homophobic, union-bashing, ultimately Teletubbies-hating Jerry Falwell (Vincent D’Onofrio).
Garfield’s screen vulnerability – the same quality that made him the most tender-hearted of Spider-Men – quivers even when his embezzling, cheating preacherman is at his most reprehensible. D’Onofrio marries the steel that defined his Kingpin in Daredevil with a purse-lipped disdain normally reserved for an unpleasant smear on the bottom of one’s shoe. Chastain, who co-produced through her Freckle Films imprint, channels Tammy’s indomitable chirpiness, a spirit that gives lie to the notion that American lives have no second acts.
Still, it’s hard to swallow the idea that Tammy Faye Bakker was entirely ignorant of the financial irregularities that sent her husband to jail in 1989. For all the impeccable production values – including Bakker’s outlandish 1980s costumes, all lovingly recreated by Mitchell Travers – the film’s generosity towards its controversial heroine feels like an unwarranted canonisation.
