Jessica Chastain's confident performance is buried under dull biopic The Eyes of Tammy Faye's confused tone. JacobOller's review:
assume your familiarity with innovating fraudster televangelists Tammy Faye Messner and Jim Bakker, it assumes your distaste for the former and the reasons for it. She was a much-mocked pop cultural cartoon in her own time , whose garish, camp exterior—and the fact that she was a woman—made her an even easier target than the rest of her peers. Opening on Jessica Chastain’s made-up face in extreme close-up drives the movie’s premise home: An assurance that there’s more under the surface.
This is the real Tammy Faye, it tells us, an LGBTQ icon whose drag queen-like persona and rare-for-her-beliefs compassion outweigh…all the other stuff. The ultra-’80s linkage of religious devotion and financial success, ready to sell saved souls for a monthly fee. The empowerment of the American political right to use and abuse Christianity.
The film’s surface feminism, asking why Tammy Faye was always the butt of the jokes, gives way to something perhaps equally sinister: A wholesale claim of ignorance, where the happy-go-lucky performer got taken advantage of just as deeply as those tuning in. It’s a backhanded attempt at a puff piece, stinging all the harder with rib-elbowing jokes that aren’t all that different from what the talk show hosts and sketch comedians leveled back in the day.
Navigating it all is a performance from Chastain that’s still plenty intriguing, and a not insignificant part of that is the sheer spectacle of watching her manipulate her Uruk-hai levels of makeup and prosthetics. It’s arresting visual work by the artists and some hefty physical acting from Chastain—whose squeaky vocal alteration is a compliment rather than a distraction—in service of a questionable retcon.
Combine that with the fact that, outside of Chastain, the performances are as thin as the characters—especially Andrew Garfield’s Jim, whose role just involves crying and apologizing from Genesis 1:1 forward—and the dull parable simply isn’t deserving of her efforts.’s attempt to explain a misunderstood public figure is mired in a confused tone that gets distracted by the same commercialization and mockery it aims to critique.
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