The Eyes of Tammy Faye has been billed as a fictional re-imagining of the 2000 documentary of the same name, which told the story of Tammy Faye Bakker (now Messner) and her troubled marriage with fellow televangelist and convicted fraudster Jim Bakker. But to call the new film a biopic would be to miss the point.
The Eyes of Tammy Faye is a cry for help: a display of unadulterated nostalgia for an America that once, or maybe never, was. Perhaps what it is mourning is the America that America used to play on TV, the country that many of us grew up believing existed somewhere.
Like heaven itself, we knew it was out there — just not for us, not right now.
Reviews of The Eyes of Tammy Faye note again and again that lead actress Jessica Chastain’s portrayal of Tammy Faye is convincing if not moving and that the film as a whole is, as one critic put it, “painfully conventional.” I happen to agree with them.
Taken at face value, The Eyes of Tammy Faye is everything we’ve come to expect of films of a certain register: a tidy three-act structure with nothing particularly innovative or surprising about the story, cloyingly precise cinematography, period-accurate, if uncreative, set design and costuming, and solid acting, including, in this case, startlingly good performances by Chastain and Andrew Garfield, who embodies Jim.
The movie begins with the young Tammy Faye, who yearns for nothing more than to be a good Christian. Her mother, who is also Christian but is skeptical of her Pentecostal church, pushes back against this desire, only for Tammy Faye seemingly to triumph when she announces her intention to marry Jim — a boy from her Bible college with whom she intends to become a traveling evangelist. From the beginning, she’s framed as a good Christian woman, and we follow her from her humble beginnings as she and Jim rise to become two of the most famous televangelists in the country as co-hosts of The PTL Club. We’re with Tammy Faye, too, as she falls from grace after Jim is convicted of fraud — for using funds he claimed were going to overseas missions in order to fund the couple’s lavish lifestyle.
But Tammy Faye is redeemed: The film closes with a depiction of her as someone with a profound gift for inspiring others to worship and fellowship. The crimes of the Bakkers act only as a narrative tool within a larger Christian parable: Once you accept Jesus, you will be met with obstacle after obstacle, both from nonbelievers and those who do not believe “big enough.” But Jesus’s love is something that you can never lose.
Even by the standards of Hollywood, however, the film leaves out a lot. It glosses over the relationship that developed in the 1980s between evangelicals like the Bakkers and the Republican Party — a major historical event that changed the way people think about religion and politics. And it soft-peddles the accusations against Jim. For instance, in the movie, Jessica Hahn is introduced to the audience as a woman Jim has “revenge sex” with after learning of Tammy Faye’s infidelity. In real life, Jessica accused Jim of sexual assault.
Movies can’t show everything, of course, but these elisions don’t do much to free up time for explorations of Tammy Faye’s internal world, either. We learn little about her relationship with Jim, and the couple’s marital troubles receive limp treatment at best. It’s as if the filmmakers know that Jim wasn’t exactly the vision of a good husband but can’t bring themselves to stick the knife in.
If anything, the Bakkers are romanticized. It’s a surprising decision coming a year and some change after the end of the Trump presidency, given Hollywood’s generally dim view of conservative Christians and the ways in which the Bakkers evoked the same all-American grandiosity that Donald Trump did.
Tammy Faye’s lavish lifestyle and theatrical behavior are painted as a net positive — not only for her but for those around her. There’s a very touching scene in which Tammy Faye convinces her no-nonsense Midwestern mother to try on a fur coat. While her mother is in the dressing room, Tammy turns to her entourage and instructs them to make her mother feel good about how she looks. They do, and she does. The coat becomes an important symbol of the renewed strength of the mother-daughter relationship until the final act of the film.
If the film has a central emotional conflict, it’s between the Bakkers and the Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr., who is painted as a deeply unlikable, even evil, figure. But for the most part, Falwell is not condemned for his anti-gay, anti-feminist rhetoric, which could have served as an easy foil to Tammy Faye’s more liberal brand of Christianity, which welcomed gay people into the faith. Rather, the conflict is between Falwell’s grim and self-denying religiosity and the Bakkers’ embrace of larger-than-life prosperity. The message seems to be that a little corruption, a little showiness, isn’t the worst thing in the world — that the real American Christianity is fantastical and theatrical, not colorless and restrained.
The Eyes of Tammy Faye seems, ultimately, to be mourning a loss of vision of America: the America of the frontier, where two nobodies from nowhere could strike out on their own, spreading the good word, and in the process reinventing themselves before finally landing in California, an empire at their feet. It’s no wonder that the movie ends with Tammy Faye singing the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” to raucous applause. It’s as if to say, “God loves you, but God loves America, too.”
Katherine Dee is a writer and co-host of the podcast After the Orgy. Find more of her work at defaultfriend.substack.com or on Twitter: @default_friend.
