The Eyes of Tammy Faye

          Jessica Chastain as Tammy Faye Bakker. Fox Searchlight photo via IMDB

Jessica Chastain and Andrew Garfield, each a past Maui Film Festival honoree, generally show up on screens at this time of year. I was going to say “on movie screens,” but as that term becomes more archaic, it marks those who use it as pretty archaic ourselves.

Still, this is awards season at the movies – no matter what size screen you watch them on – and Jessica and Andrew are A-team players, persistent contenders even if they haven't actually won the big O yet. Having long questioned the competitive nature of film awards, wondering how you can actually give scores to creative acts, I'm now revising my judgment. For actors, certain roles are like athletic tests, not of speed and strength necessarily, but of range and how far they can stretch.

“The Eyes of Tammy Faye” calls for lots of stretching.

Why would Chastain choose to play a role as bizarre and caricatured as disgraced '90s televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker,  you wonder before seeing the film. By the time it ends you wonder how she could have made the character so sympathetic.

No such luck for Garfield, who's stuck playing a milquetoast sleazeball from beginning to end.

The title is unfortunate, but then again, so are Tammy Faye's eyes themselves. Our first look at her is late in her career as she prepares for a photo shoot, When the makeup person calls for reducing the cosmetics on Tammy's face, we learn that both the harlequin eye shadow and black-ringed red lips are permanent.

Directed by Michael Showalter, the story begins with Tammy's girlhood in International Falls, Minn., where she not only picked up her “you betcha” accent, but also the optimistic spirit and religious zeal that would set her destiny. Her longing for God's salvation was complicated – more like caused – by her mother (Cherry Jones)'s refusal to let Tammy attend the fundamentalist services where she played piano. Tammy was the daughter of her first husband, and her mother felt the girl's presence would remind the congregation of their accompanist's status as a divorced “harlot.”

Tammy's earliest communions with God were alone in her room where she literally talked to her hand. This skill proved useful early in her ministry when she instructed children through puppet shows.

It was at a small divinity college that she met her husband-to-be. From the beginning, Jim Bakker preached that material success was the sign of God's blessing, a message not lost on the rapturous coed in the chapel drinking in every word.

After they wed and set out on the road to preach, God revealed His plan for them through a fortuitous encounter with Pat Robertson. Robertson (Gabriel Olds), along with Jimmy Falwell (Vincent D'Onofrio), were pioneers in the new field of Christian broadcasting, bringing fundamentalism to television, It wasn't long before the Bakkers eclipsed them, thanks largely to Tammy's talents as both a gifted singer and a surprisingly empathetic interviewer on wide-ranging subjects including penile implants.

Jim, in turn, built monuments to their faith in construction projects on grander and grander scales, right up to a biblical theme park. But for all his preaching about the blessings of wealth, his creditors didn't get the message. The root of his edifice complex seems to have stemmed from problems expressing his manhood elsewhere. Tammy turned a blind eye to rumors, and other indications, of Jim's homosexuality … perhaps the most grievous “sin” on his mentor Jerry Falwell's religious-political-cultural agenda.

The Bakkers' rise began in the Reagan era. While the ker-ching of phones ringing on pledge desks was the big amen to whatever they were preaching to the cameras, it was Falwell who sensed the power to be had in breaking down the barrier between church and state that had been the foundation of American democracy. 

For Falwell the mission was political, to wrest control of the weapon of television from the godless, secular corporations who controlled the media at the time. It was the first primitive foray into a conflict that has been refined into a battle for hearts and minds now known as “culture wars.”

While Pat Robertson was a garden-variety, car-salesman religious huckster, Falwell was smarter, and more sinister. D'Onofrio's performance as Falwell is skin-crawlingly creepy, hissing his “S's” like a snake when he speaks. 

Ironically, it was Tammy Faye's Christianity – naïve, pure, and heartfelt – that put her on a collision course with Falwell and the other pastors' hypocrisy. Their response to her, beginning with her husband's cruelty following the birth of their second child, turned her into a drug addict.

Showing not only tolerance but love for the LGBQ that deepened at the end of her life, Tammy's sincere belief that “God loves you just the way you are” proclaimed on the PTL network was no different from public broadcasting saint Mr. Rogers at the other end of the spectrum.

While her husband was a weak-willed, duplicitous opportunistic scam artist, Tammy Bakker's only sin was being trusting and gullible enough to believe him. 

The rise and fall of Jim and Tammy Bakker was a parable or parody, but a fine mess, either way. So is the movie, which can never decide whether to cringe, condemn or just laugh off its characters. 

But it brings redemption, too, Going through a life's worth of physical changes, not to mention mountains of face and body makeup that turn her into a clown-faced blimp by film's end, Chastain still dazzles, doing her own vocals along the way, overturning whatever preconception you bring to the story.

In its place she leaves a portrait of what faith truly looks like.