After nearly a decade of gaining an audience for their work in The 700 Club, Jim Bakker (Andrew Garfield) and Tammy Faye (Jessica Chastain) created their own platform: The PTL Club.  As the heads of their own massively popular televangelist show – and later network – the couple preached the gospel, performed Christian music, and would broach topics which their more traditional colleagues shied away from.  The Eyes of Tammy Faye is a decades-spanning biopic of the iconically made-up evangelist which documents the couple’s meteoric rise to fame and subsequent fall from grace. 

Eyes is the latest in a run of snappy biopics seeking to reclaim and reframe the legacy of some of our “misunderstood” celebrities that were more infamous than famous.  In the same vein as I, Tonya (2017) and Vice (2018), Abe Sylvia’s script moves at an incredible speed and does not linger too long on any one aspect of Tammy’s story.  To be fair, Sylvia has a lot of ground to cover and there is much that is left off of the page, too, but this hit-and-move writing does not allow for much time for introspection.  Reading more like a SparkNotes version of her life, we get a good overview of who Tammy Faye was, but we are never allowed the details – and as Jim will later say about details: “God is in them!” 

Despite this approach which leaves his subject at a distance, Chastain excels in and is unrecognizable as the title role.  It would be easy to write off her performance as all hair, makeup, and wardrobe (Costumes by Mitchell Travers with hair and makeup led by Linda Dowds), but Chastain brings her exceptional skill as an actress throughout the entire film as she dons not just the many styles Tammy cycled through, but also her varying degrees of comfort and control in front of the camera.  She has a bold command of the screen in the showier scenes, for sure, but Chastain really shines in the quieter moments of the film. 

Garfield, as Jim, delivers a strong performance but plays a secondary role to Chastain.  The script largely glosses over Jim’s involvement in the scandals which would disrupt – and ultimately lead to the bankruptcy of – The PTL Network.  Jim introduces so much strife into Tammy’s life throughout the course of the film, and Chastain is at her strongest in the few moments of honest confrontation with her husband.  Without taking away the agency of Tammy in her own film, a more carefully planned script could have still treated her as the star while allowing Jim to fill a larger role, too.  She was a woman who danced to the beat of her own drum, much to the chagrin of her husband and his associates, and the story of her commitment to her values plays out more like the B-plot than the main story line that it deserves to be. 

The Eyes of Tammy Faye does delve briefly into some of her more unconventional and unorthodox programming choices.  There is a segment where she is demonstrating a penile pump in front of a live studio audience, but the script and the film never show what led to a televangelist promoting sex aids on her program.  It treats her like the butt of a joke, a quirky housewife that you tune in to so you can laugh in shock at her off kilter antics.  As the film progresses, and Tammy’s career as host develops, her famous interview with Steven Pieters (Randy Havens), a gay, Christian minister who was diagnosed with AIDS is thankfully handled with much more tact.  Again, though, the script quickly moves on and does not meaningfully address the fallout from airing such a segment on a televangelist network in the midst of the AIDS crisis. The film sets out to show us Tammy Faye as a person, but the script is afraid to actually show her in moments of humanity and instead focuses on Tammy as a character. 

Director Michael Showalter’s latest effort has all the glitz and glam to capture the eye and get us intrigued to sit and watch but is very formulaic in its structure and approach.  Released by Searchlight Pictures, Eyes admittedly has a little more bite to it than similar biopics released under the stricter Disney umbrella which acquired the film.  At 126 minutes, the film does not lose momentum until the final 15 where the script really asks Chastain to show us the woman behind all the makeup.  Put simply, the script does not support Chastain with enough material to stick the landing, at no fault of hers.  As we had been kept at arm’s length from her for the majority of the film, it is not the strongest of conclusions and the tonal shift makes is seem as if Showalter and Sylvia are not really interested in Tammy’s redemption in popular culture at all.  It is an undeniably triumphant finale for her, but it feels hollow as the film stumbles to its conclusion. 

The Eyes of Tammy Faye focuses more on her show than the actual relationships that Tammy has forged.  It clearly tries to put her life more into context than may be perceived just from her time on television, and while it does do that to varying degrees of success at different points in the film, it still treats her like a commodity to be exploited.  In its refusal to get too close to her and only ever giving us a macro view into her world, the overall impact of the film falls flat.  Chastain is electric from beginning to end, though, and it is her commitment to the role that is the driving force of the film.