The Eyes of Tammy Faye

Release Date: September 17, 2021

Watch Date: February 21 – February 23, 2023

 

    Tammy Faye was a complicated woman.

    In many ways, she exhibited a lot of the very good things about religion. She was someone willing to accept people from all walks of life, someone who was able to look past mistakes, someone who made mistakes themselves and learned from it. She believed in a loving god, a forgiving god. In the end, she needed to believe in that kind of god for her own sake, but for a very long time it was not for any selfish reason, and by the end it may not have been either. She was a woman who wanted to do good, to have a positive impact on the world.

    We will never know just how much of Jim Bakker’s crimes Tammy was actually privy to. We won’t know what she knew, or just how innocent she was. We know what she’s testified to, but that’s about it. It is very easy, knowing the personality we were shown on our television screens, to assume she knew nothing, or hand-waved away any discrepancies that she couldn’t explain. Her life with Jim was far from perfect, and to some degree she simply wanted to be loved and accepted, and if not paying too much attention to Jim’s work, or what got her on television, got her there, I don’t know, personally, how much she would have questioned it. I can be hopeful that this is a fairly accurate representation of the truth, but again, we’ll never know.

    Both of our leads do a phenomenal job, losing themselves in their roles. It’s very difficult to still see Andrew Garfield as the man who played Spiderman even fifteen minutes after he was introduced, he plays Jim Bakker so well. Jessica Chastain is not recognizable. She has become a completely different person, and she does so beautifully. They age the cast up through the years remarkably well, and it’s nice because it gives you a sense of time passing over a film that encompasses such a large scope of a human life.

    This movie has an overall positive message, and manages to end on a weirdly patriotic note which Bob very much supported, but I think it comes a little bit out of left field? Maybe if I had grown up with Tammy Faye being more of a celebrity in my circle, I might have understood it better? Her love of her country just isn’t really shown…literally anywhere else in the film? It just needed a bald eagle flying through the scene, that’s all I’m saying. It’s a bit over the top.

    I don’t think this is a movie you sit down and watch every week, or even every month. But if you want to put on a good drama, if you want to open up the floor to discussions of morality, of the benefits and downsides of televangelism, then you could do so, so much worse.