Jessica Chastain as Tammy Faye Bakker in The Eyes of Tammy Faye

Best Actress at the 94th Annual Oscars (2021)

Notable Quote:

“I just wanna love people.”

Synopsis:

Jim (Andrew Garfield) and Tammy Faye Bakker (Jessica Chastain) build a preaching empire from the ground up, but Jim’s hypocrisies and indiscretions threaten to bring it all down. What will Tammy Faye do without her beautiful furs!?!

The character:

The Tammy Faye of this movie is an overgrown child. She’s incredibly naïve, with no understanding of concepts like “mean people” or “religious intolerance” and certainly no awareness of her husband’s misdeeds. This complete lack of awareness means that she moves through life with a mortifying earnestness. I mean, this is a grown woman who often talks to herself through a cutesy puppet. She’s incapable of dialing back her intensely chipper attitude, and has no idea that other people find her annoying.

The one place that Tammy Faye actually does shine is on stage, doing her show for PTL. She seems confident and inviting, and she’s willing to talk about unconventional topics for a Christian television host. Unfortunately, that so fully deviates from her personality in the film that it’s unbelievable. Real life Tammy Faye is a fascinating contradiction, but that never comes across in the movie. For instance, the fact that she’s weirdly supportive of gay people is one of her best qualities, but the movie doesn’t really examine that. Is there a reason she takes up for gay people, despite it being an unpopular stance? I don’t want her motivations overexplained, but some sense of why she’s such a radical weirdo would be nice.

The performance:

Oh Oscars, you’ve done it again. This win ticks off so many Oscars bingo boxes: an oft-nominated star finally gets a win for playing a famous person, in a role that requires them to slather on tons of makeup. I didn’t have high hopes for the film, but still set aside my biases initially: but I’m sorry, I genuinely did not like Jessica Chastain in this role at all! Every character choice she makes is so bizarre. For instance, she gives Tammy Faye a thick, Fargo-style Minnesota accent that’s both silly, and not Tammy Faye’s real accent? Likewise, she’s got this honking laugh that truly gives Pennywise vibes.

Mostly, I’m disappointed because Tammy Faye is such a striking, bizarre individual, and Chastain’s choices flatten her. The Tammy Faye of the film is annoying, and witless, and lacks depth. The real woman is both stranger and more charismatic. Jessica Chastain does great puppy dog sad eyes, so I have a lot of empathy for her character, but I certainly don’t have any understanding of her. The makeup just adds to the horror: I actually like 70s Tammy, but by late in her life, she looks like a beautiful woman wearing silly prosthetics.

The movie:

Even more than a biopic, I loathe an adaptation of a documentary. If you want to see this story, it’s literally already a movie! I will at least say that the arc of this particular tale is one that lends itself to a film well: we love to see a scam empire built and then crash down, although the film doesn’t tackle much of Tammy Faye’s life post-Jim, which for me is the most interesting time of her life (remember when she was on The Surreal Life with Ron Jeremy and Vanilla Ice?!). Andrew Garfield’s performance is even more upsetting than Jessica Chastain’s, so much reliance on painted on wrinkles and a cheesy accent. The film is fine, but it’s not interesting.

Was the Oscar deserved?

No, this is everything people make fun of the Oscars for.