I’m hard-pressed to think of anybody whose life story interests me less.
Director Michael Showalter and scripter Abe Sylvia’s adaptation of the 2000 Fenton Bailey/Randy Barbato documentary clearly intends a re-evaluation of Tammy Faye Bakker, the more flamboyant half of husband Jim Bakker’s impressively massive PTL (Praise the Lord) broadcasting network and religious empire.
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| With their media empire crumbling amid multiple financial and moral scandals, Tammy Faye (Jessica Chastain) and Jim Bakker (Andrew Garfield) make a last-ditch effort to plead their case on national news shows. |
That said…
The agony is intensified by the astonishing persuasiveness with which stars Jessica Chastain and Andrew Garfield portray the televangelist couple. It’s frankly spooky; more than once, I had to remember that this was a film, and not the 2000 documentary.
Chastain’s performance goes much deeper than the surface affectations of Tammy Faye’s clown-worthy makeup, hairstyles and trendy on-air garb. Chastain nails the head tilts, the perky smile, the gently swaying “moments with God” and — most notably — the initially cute Betty Boop voice, which becomes insufferable as Tammy Faye grows older.
Garfield, in turn, oozes insincere, egomaniacal smarm from the moment Jim and Tammy Faye meet, at Minnesota’s North Central Bible College. She’s sweet and impressionable; he radiates “stalker.” We see the wheels spinning behind Garfield’s gaze, as the far-thinking Jim immediately recognizes that this plain-spoken but clearly suggestible young woman will be an important asset to his future plans.
They marry almost immediately, much to the chagrin of her mother Rachel, played with richly nuanced depth — total honor and heart — by the always magnificent Cherry Jones.
The goal of a biographical film such as this — the reason for its existence — should be to explore the background of an individual who grows up to become such an unabashed monster. Alas, Sylvia’s script doesn’t give us much.
A brief flashback introduces us to adolescent Tammy Faye (Chandler Head), Rachel’s only child by a brief marriage that ended in divorce. Although she re-marries, making Tammy Faye the eldest of eight children in a blended family, Rachel remains a pariah in this tiny Minneapolis community, despite total devotion and commitment to her faith. As a result, Tammy Faye is forbidden to attend the Pentecostal church where her mother plays piano alongside a fire-and-brimstone preacher, lest she remind parishioners of the divorce.
But Tammy Faye wants to attend, wants more than anything to be part of this environment: to hear the word of God. After watching services from outside, via a window, she shrewdly perceives what is necessary. So she resolutely enters the church the following Sunday, walks up to the preacher, and collapses onto the floor in a rapturous fit, complete with muttered gibberish. The congregation is ecstatic.
So … has the little girl indeed succumbed to God’s voice?
Or is she performing, giving the crowd what it wants and expects, in order to get what she wants?
Rachel clearly believes the latter (as do I).
We then flash-forward to the early 1960s, and the Bible college meet-cute between Jim and Tammy Faye.
At first blush, their resulting ministry feels earnest: a grueling series of tent-show revival meetings where Tammy Faye takes a leaf from Shari Lewis, and engages youngsters with a series of sock puppets. The approach is clever: Enchant the children, and their parents will follow.
Chastain shades Tammy Faye during these early years as wholesome and heartfelt, with an intense insistence that “God loves everybody,” soon adding “…just the way you are” (a message later delivered, with greater sincerity and absent the religious hyperbole, by Fred Rogers). At this point, as well, it becomes clear that Tammy Faye’s trusting vulnerability is soon to be overwhelmed — and abused — by her Svengali-esque husband.
Even here, during the early stages, Garfield’s eyes glitter with naked ambition. Jim’s disingenuous fawning and calculated maneuvering are on full display, as he navigates each rung of the ladder to world conquest; he’s Dickens’ Uriah Heep come to life.
Two more key players enter at this point, starting with Pat Robertson (Gabriel Olds), who grants Tammy Faye and Jim their first televised ministry on his Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN). Olds plays him as stiff and stoic: an evangelist who believes in three-piece suits, and can’t quite fathom the behavior of these “upstart youngsters.”
Vincent D’Onofrio’s Jerry Falwell is a different creature: a Bible-thumping absolutist who is contemptuous of the Bakkers’ charismatic, Pentecostal faith … but soon is quite envious of the empire they build. D’Onofrio plays Falwell, as a smooth, refined, dark-suited wolf in sheep’s clothing, waiting for the opportunity to pounce.
We’re soon forced to confront the contradiction that Tammy Faye becomes, and Chastain doesn’t make it easy. We’re led to believe that she never sheds her youthful naïveté: that her faith and trust in her husband are absolute, even as his behavior becomes ever more aloof and suspect. Garfield, in turn, becomes a terrifying rage machine as he ruthlessly exploits his wife’s devotion, culminating in a truly heinous demand … which she fulfills, on camera, in front of PTL’s worldwide viewers.
But is this, too, merely an act, and part of a coldly calculated performance?
Frankly, it’s easier to believe that, than to accept the notion that Tammy Faye was clueless and blind to the largess they accumulated, and the obscenely lavish lifestyle funded by gullible viewers who hit the phones every time Jim said “Jump!” At some point, it simply becomes impossible to forgive her. She becomes our very own Imelda Marcos.
At his insatiable peak, Jim sold tens of thousands of $1,000 “lifetime memberships” and “exclusive partnerships” to fund a luxury Heritage USA hotel chain, but only one 500-room structure was ever built. (Apparently, he was inspired by The Producers’ Max Bialystock.) And we’re to assume Tammy Faye simply turned a blind eye to this?
On a tangential note, Jim and Tammy Faye have two children: Tammy Sue (“Sissy”) and then Jamie Charles (“Jay”). Aside from a repulsive moment when an adolescent Tammy Sue (Lila Jane Meadows) preens while she and her mother wear ghastly matching fur coats, neither child is seen or even mentioned in the third act. That’s just sloppy.
Country music singer Mark Wystrach handles himself well in a brief but telling role as Grammy Award-winning singer/producer Gary Paxton, who senses Tammy Faye’s pain during their recording sessions. Sam Jaeger is similarly solid as the quietly savvy Roe Messner, the real estate developer who builds Heritage USA, and — raised eyebrow alert — eventually becomes Tammy Faye’s future husband.
The film concludes with Tammy Faye’s years-later attempt at a comeback, when she sings “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” — at first cautiously, through tears, and then triumphantly — before an initially indifferent and hostile crowd that soon jumps to its feet with bravura applause. At which point, Chastain faces the camera, smiles, and the screen goes black.
We’re therefore expected to believe that her eyes have been opened, and that she’ll henceforth be a better, kinder person. Acceptance of that will be up to the individual viewer.
I didn’t buy it. Neither here, nor in real life.
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