126 min | PG-13 | September 17, 2021 | Searchlight Pictures
Tammy Faye Bakker builds a televangelism empire alongside her husband Jim, then watches fraud and scandal burn it down. Jessica Chastain vanishes under pounds of prosthetics to play her. The makeup does more work than the script.
The Eyes of Tammy Faye traces the rise and fall of Tammy Faye Bakker. She and her husband Jim build the PTL Club into a televangelism empire, then fraud and Jim’s imprisonment tear it down. The film wants to rehabilitate Tammy Faye as a figure of empathy inside a movement that ran on fear and money. It reads her mascara and her tears as proof of sincerity. The thesis is that she was the genuine article surrounded by hypocrites. The film never once tests that thesis.
Jessica Chastain plays Tammy Faye as a woman who needs every person in the room to love her. She pitches the voice high and bright and holds eye contact a beat too long. Chastain buries herself in prosthetics and refuses to let the makeup do the acting for her. Andrew Garfield plays Jim Bakker with a salesman’s hunger and a coward’s gift for looking away. Vincent D’Onofrio plays Jerry Falwell as a slab of cold political arithmetic. Cherry Jones plays Tammy Faye’s mother Rachel as a woman whose disapproval never thaws.
Michael Showalter directs the material as a by-the-numbers rise-and-fall biopic that hits every beat on schedule. Abe Sylvia’s script sprints through decades in montage and leaves no room for the contradictions to breathe. The makeup and hairstyling carries the picture, aging Chastain across decades with work that reads as character instead of costume. The camera parks in close-up on Tammy Faye’s face and asks you to accept the emotion as truth. Period detail piles up in the wallpaper and the wigs and the studio sets. The film mistakes that accumulation for insight.
The Eyes of Tammy Faye puts a total transformation at its center and a vacuum around it. Chastain commits fully to a woman the film declines to interrogate. Every scene wants you to feel for Tammy Faye. Not one of them asks you to think about her. The result is a sympathy machine that confuses surface for depth. It wraps a conventional biopic in spectacular makeup and bets you will not notice the difference.