Vincent D’Onofrio

(On Cable TV, August 2022) I remain… unconvinced by The Eyes of Tammy Faye. Part rehabilitation of a fraudster’s wife, part criticism of televangelism in the 1980s, it’s a film that doesn’t quite seem to figure out what story it wants to tell, or how to tell it. That doesn’t stop Jessica Chastain from delivering an Oscar-winning performance as Faye, or Andrew Garfield from doing his best in incarnating Jim Bakker in all of his boy-choir crookedness. The film moves from the early courtship of the two characters in the early 1960s all the way to the heydays of their TV ministry in the 1980s, and then on to their fall from grace when his accounting frauds come to the attention of the government, precipitated by sexual misconduct allegations. The Eyes of Tammy Faye is definitely sympathetic to Faye in that she’s portrayed as a Bakker dupe, unaware of his activities throughout the decades and nominally more sympathetic for her empathy for AIDS patients and the gay community. (That scene is both terrific and factual.) Most of the events of the film are now sufficiently distant that the historical record is mostly factual—although one notes that Faye is now dead and Bakker isn’t. (In fact, he’s still a televangelist on the dumber side of right-wing politics.)  Where the film takes liberties is in spray-painting its subject as maybe duped by her husband, maybe not quite as bad as him, maybe not entirely a willing participant in the repulsive prosperity gospel of the era. The Eyes of Tammy Faye doesn’t seem interested in presenting its subject as anything other than a martyr of other false prophets (thanks to a small but captivating performance from Vincent D’Onofrio as Jerry Falwell) and I suppose that’s one way of seeing it. I’m clearly not the target audience for this film, though—the acting is nice but the rest of it leaves me squinting suspiciously.