Adapted from the 2000 documentary of the same name, Michael Showalter’s The Eyes of Tammy Faye announces with its very first shot that it will thrive on exaggeration above all else. The film opens on a tight close-up of Tammy Faye Bakker’s (Jessica Chastain) face, her eyes and lips caked in the makeup that she became known for throughout her life. As a makeup artist fails to temper that gaudiness ahead of the fiftysomething Tammy Faye taking to the stage, the moment serves as an apt, if unintentional, metaphor for a film that struggles to scrape beneath the surface and show us the real Tammy Faye.
Despite a dynamic performance by Chastain, the woman revealed to us throughout film is a hopelessly naïve cipher, nothing more and nothing less. Virtually all of Tammy Faye’s main cohorts, from husband and fraudster Jim Bakker (Andrew Garfield) to pastor and Moral Majority founder Jerry Fallwell (Vincent D’Onofrio), talk in ways that allude to their corruption, but the filmmakers can’t be bothered to get into the nitty gritty of all that. In the end, The Eyes of Tammy Faye mostly plays out as a showcase for Chastain to bring as much emotional sturm und drang to the woman as she lurches between various states of turmoil.
Like many a Hollywood biopic before it, The Eyes of Tammy Faye is blatantly reductive in illustrating its protagonist’s psychology, namely how it’s shaped by a handful of specific events. In flashbacks to Tammy Faye’s childhood, we learn that she became a social outcast after her parents divorced. Despite the fact that her mother (Cherry Jones) served as the pianist in their small-town Minnesota church, the young Tammy Faye (played by Chandler Head) is a mark of shame in her fundamentalist community, only finding acceptance when she begins convulsing and speaking in tongues after taking her first communion.
Elsewhere, the film never allows Chastain to go beyond the distinctive vocal and facial tics that made Tammy Faye one of the most recognizable, and controversial, religious figures of her time. In lieu of letting us see what exactly made her human, the film is content to have the woman flail about from the effects of years of emotional negligence, from both her mother and husband, and her daily diet of Ativan and Diet Coke. As written by Abe Sylvia, The Eyes of Tammy Faye is about as interested in vividly rendering Tammy Faye’s emotional torment as it is the scandals that brought down the Bakkers—which is to say not at all.
The film is nothing if not meticulous when it comes to portraying Tammy Faye in a very sympathetic light, constantly framing her as just out of earshot of almost every important business dealing, and often speaking of inclusion and non-judgment whenever she’s present. Her famous interview with AIDS patient Steve Pieters (Randy Havens) is presented here as further evidence of her innate compassion and open-mindedness. Yet while her attempts to counter the prejudices of those around her are accurate, at least according to public record, we never get a sense of what made her want to live in a house of cards made possible by her husband’s illegal activities. For all her supposed philanthropy, she never once questions why more of those funds raised by the PTL Television Network weren’t diverted to the causes she supposedly believed in so strongly, and the film simply chalks this up to pure naïveté.
Ultimately, The Eyes of Tammy Faye exists primarily as a marathon event for its performers to run in pyrotechnic circles around each other. Tellingly, the end credits include ample footage of the actors and the people they play side by side. It’s a thinly veiled attempt on the film’s part to attest to an authenticity that’s only evident in such mimicry, and which is seemingly meant to stand for greatness in and of itself. The Eyes of Tammy Faye’s uneasy balance of parody and faux-empathy evades actual psychological motivation in favor of smug, knowing nods to appease an audience that already knows that Tammy Faye is wrapped up in an elaborate con game and simply must wait for the pleasure of seeing the bottom drop out.
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