The brows are tattooed on. The lashes are merely immovable. Campy biopic The Eyes of Tammy Faye gets off to a literal start with a close-up of televangelist Tammy Faye Messner, played with frantic pep by Jessica Chastain. The undated scene seems to be the ’90s, after Messner’s ex-husband Jim Bakker was jailed on a long list of fraud charges. With a make-up artist off camera, Chastain’s flamboyant singer/personality warns them her cosmetics are mostly permanent: “This is who I am,” she cheerfully insists. Usually biographies seek to peer behind the mask. Wish us luck, the movie winks.
The arc is standard-issue: childhood is tough but the heroine, a born entertainer, has grown up chipper. At Bible college, she meets the trainee preacher she will marry. Already telling any flock in earshot that God does not want us to be poor, the fame-hungry Bakker is played by Andrew Garfield, never more a ringer for Anthony Perkins in Psycho. Tammy Faye is the one with the unpleasable mother but, like Norman Bates, Jim’s urges shape the story. Between his wife’s golly-gee vim and his ambition, the pair are soon stars in the fast-expanding world of Christian broadcasting.
The path to downfall has an antic tone, irony laid on thick. Jim rarely fails to praise Jesus as the money pours in through the ’80s. The scope of the story is narrow — neither the believers who send him their good-faith donations nor the context of Reagan’s America intrude. That might reflect life in the Bakker mansion, but weirder is the lack of real attention to Tammy Faye’s inner thoughts, as if the film really did stop looking in that opening scene. Chastain gives it her best shot but the movie (directed by Michael Showalter) stacks the odds against her, in theory sympathetic to her character yet always on the brink of a snigger.
It can’t help but suffer by comparison with Spencer, in which another bravura actress, Kristen Stewart, excelled as a different statement dresser who married badly and found herself picked at by a scowling establishment. Here that takes the form of hellfire pastor Jerry Falwell (Vincent D’Onofrio), enraged by another Diana-ism, the embrace of the gay community. “We’re all just people,” Chastain beams. “And God didn’t make any junk.” If that sounds like the cue for a song, the movie feels like a musical without the tunes.
★★★☆☆
In UK cinemas from February 4
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