The Secular War on Tammy Faye

Jessica Chastain’s Oscar win for The Eyes of Tammy Faye was confirmation that Hollywood operates out of secular antipathy. In her acceptance speech, Chastain rambled on about LGBTQ rights rather than explain how her role as the late televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker exemplified Christian compassion for AIDS sufferers. Nor did she take the opportunity to urge for sympathetic religious coexistence today. Yet Chastain’s prejudiced discourse was consistent with the film itself, which blends satire, melodrama, and barely concealed contempt for its subject. Sharing its title with a 2000 documentary by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, the conceptual artists behind drag queen RuPaul’s media empire, the movie presents Tammy Faye as a camp icon. Her kewpie-doll make-up and Betty Boop voice contrast with the fervor of her gospel singing; she’s an eccentric to the straightlaced Christian-fundamentalist world. She’s also a bystander to the schemes of her husband Jim Bakker (Andrew Garfield) to win souls while making lucrative television broadcasts. Their PTL (Praise the Lord) show boasted 20 million viewers a day in 56 countries. It was Bakker’s embezzlement that ended the famous couple’s high living in ruin and shame.

But Tammy Faye is also eccentric to director Michael Showalter and screenwriter Abe Sylvia, who present her as the central act of America’s patriotic and religious clown show. They’re uninterested in the Bakkers’ faith. The only filmmaker I’d trust with this complicated subject would be the charismatic Mormon Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite, Gentleman Broncos).

The film’s Oscar-winning makeup puts puffy cheeks on Chastain’s long face, which gives her the look of a mascaraed basset hound, weirdly accentuated by ’80s fashions — exercise togs, glittery headbands, big-shouldered Dynasty dresses, and fur coats. Tall Garfield makes the diminutive Jim Bakker similarly grotesque: a rangy, effeminate twerp. Chastain and Garfield are canny actors, but these characterizations veer between pathos and ridicule. Each might as well be wearing outsize masks to make Brechtian farce of Christianity as greedy, materialistic, and sexually perverse.

Ironically, Tammy Faye’s compassion for the homosexuals among God’s creatures doesn’t extend to Showalter and Sylvia’s dirty-minded depiction of the Bakkers’ individual temptations. (Jim frolics with a dorky TV production assistant, and Tammy performs a lap dance for a hunky record producer — each going just so far.) These transgressive filmmakers turn out to be judgmental prudes when it comes to portraying heterosexual marriage and faith-centered eroticism. Their prejudice against religion is hung up on the possibility of chaste sex and marital fidelity. The Book of Solomon gets mocked alongside teenage Tammy’s frenzied religious ecstasy.

Hollywood used to practice respect, if not sympathy, for a subject’s faith, whatever its denomination, in such religious-based movies as A Man Called Peter, I’d Climb the Highest Mountain, and Stars in My Crown. But The Eyes of Tammy Faye disdains Christianity, reducing it to the Bakkers’ power struggles with Pat Robertson (Gabriel Olds) and Jerry Falwell (Vincent D’Onofrio). The latter vows to “fight the Left, feminist, homosexual agenda,” but the film is consistently skeptical of religious business and committed to demonizing America’s religious class.

No biopic has been this stridently Left vs. Right since Adam McKay’s Dick Cheney character-assassination movie, Vice. Despite Tammy Faye advising Falwell that “we should just keep politics out of the church” (a concession the filmmakers approve), the story snidely emphasizes class war: Falwell harrumphs, “There’s too much on the line. Democrats are already trying to strip away our church’s tax-exempt status. When’s lunch?”

The Eyes of Tammy Faye’s utter failure could be gleaned from Chastain’s Oscar speech when she conflated her own secular contempt with self-congratulation. It was a replay of the film’s ending when a disgraced Tammy Faye attempts a comeback, singing before a stony Oral Roberts audience and clinging to her own psychotic, patriotic delusion. She fantasizes a gospel choir in pink with a U.S. flag as backdrop and shouts, “Thank you, Lord, for the United States of America!”

Contemptuous of Tammy Faye, America, and religion, this film’s judgment focuses on the Bakkers’ scandal. An early “Pearly Gate” (as in Watergate) montage sarcastically establishes the authority of TV icons Bryant Gumbel, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, Hugh Downs, Garrick Utley, and Maria Shriver. This “history,” delivered by biased media victors, comports with Chastain’s Oscar lecture. Chastain may think she’s redeemed Tammy Faye, but the coalition of Hollywood and media judges never realizes the ugliness of their condescension.