Looking Camp Right in The Eyes of Tammy Faye
Jessica Chastain leads a wild new biopic that manages to be a perfect vehicle for its larger-than-life protagonist
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Image: Searchlight Pictures
The new biopic The Eyes of Tammy Faye is so imbued with drama that the story behind the story could make its own little deliciously cinematic vignette. Picture it: It’s 2012 and Jessica Chastain is on the press tour for the movie featuring what will become her breakout role, Zero Dark Thirty (for which she was eventually nominated for an Oscar). She’s flicking around channels and stops when she comes upon an image familiar to anyone who was paying attention to pop culture in the ’80s: the larger-than-life presence of Tammy Faye Messner (formerly Bakker). Known for eyelashes that could be spotted from the moon, a Betty Boop voice, fraternizing with puppets, and the scandal that stripped her and her husband Jim Bakker of their empire—which included a Christian cable network and theme park—Tammy Faye Bakker came to be considered by many a laughingstock. That is, until a 2000 documentary directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, the visionaries behind the production company World of Wonder and co-creators of RuPaul’s Drag Race. Also titled The Eyes of Tammy Faye, the project examined the fallen televangelist through a much more sympathetic lens, highlighting her gay-friendliness, irresistible eccentricities, and, more than anything, apparent kindness that seemed much more in line with a Christian way of life than most people who have made a fortune in this country peddling Jesus and the promise of prosperity to a desperate flock.
Chastain, as described in a recent Los Angeles Times profile, connected with the misunderstood Messner and snapped up the rights to the doc. Now, nearly 10 years later, her compassion has come to fruition. The Chastain-starring Eyes of Tammy Faye is out Friday and it is a wild ride, part conventional rags-to-riches-to-rags biopic, part performance art featuring Chastain under increasing layers of prosthetics and pounds of eyelashes pitching up her voice to meet Bakker’s exhilaration. Chastain frequently turns up her performance to an 11 (she’s barely below an eight for the duration of the movie, and she appears in almost every scene), and what’s weirder is it actually works. It is a gutsy, sensitive, howlingly funny performance that feels both put on and genuine, much in the same way the idiosyncratic Bakker did.
“It was a rich basket of materials we were working with,” said screenwriter Abe Sylvia, who worked closely with Chastain as he wrote his script. “We had lots of conversations about tone in the direction and Tammy’s attitude in each and every scene,” he continued. “And what’s the best way to fully express what she’s going through. We always framed it with that in mind. The character first. You just get a very strong point of view about this woman was, and I think it shows in the performance.” Sylvia said he spent about four months researching before writing the script to flesh out the documentary’s source material. He read books and biographies but avoided tabloid reports “and those kinds of sources that would that would taint my mission to kind of get at the truth of the feelings.”
It is a gutsy, sensitive, howlingly funny performance that feels both put on and genuine, much in the same way the idiosyncratic Bakker did whenever she spoke in public.
Biopics are a dime a dozen and they frequently feel like cheats—a lot of spinning wheels and pretensions of prestige for films that don’t ultimately get at the root of their subjects’ emotional lives. For over-the-top subjects like Tammy Faye Bakker and Jim Bakker (played here by Andrew Garfield, also under a pile of prosthetics), the biopic feels like a perfect vehicle. So melodramatic was their rise to prominence and fall from grace that only a soap opera might encapsulate them better. Showalter noted that the format of the film shifts subtly as it goes: It starts as a standard biopic only to focus more and more on Tammy Faye’s interiority. “By the end of the movie, you’re with her completely inside her experience, hopefully,” he said.
Indeed, the movie is a trove of unexpected charms, much like its subject. In 1985, Bakker famously interviewed Steve Pieters, a gay man who had been diagnosed with AIDS. Her empathy and refusal to condemn his homosexuality won her a gay following (sometimes, especially in less accepting eras, it has taken little more than a pledge of allegiance to win over the gays, though Tammy Faye’s quirks certainly didn’t hurt, either). In a way, this biopic extends Bakker’s mission of compassion evident in the Pieters interview.