"The Eyes of Tammy Faye" Review

Tammy Faye (Jessica Chastain) grows up as the black sheep eldest child of Rachel (Cherry Jones), an unsettling reminder of the woman's divorce and subsequent ostracization from her local church. When she is touched by faith, Tammy Faye begins a lifelong quest to "bring God's word to the people", meeting her husband Jim Bakker (Andrew Garfield) along the way, and getting caught up with some unsavoury business...

I liked this.
Despite not turning into a tale of a woman who can foresee murders...
It follows the rise to fame, rags to riches and fall from grace with a lot of speed, and the usual biopic lines, but is anchored by an excellent performance from Jessica Chastain and wisely perhaps choosing to focus on the character of Tammy Faye herself rather than the sleaze, unpleasantness and shitty behaviour of these churches and how awful Jim Bakker is. Chastain is wonderful, and captures a woman who just wanted to love people and Jesus wonderfully, working well with Garfield, who nails it as Bakker.
The pace is a tad too breakneck for my tastes, and could perhaps have benefitted from being either kitschy camp (matching the character and the world she lived in) or wild and spectacular like the best biopic: "I, Tonya", but whilst it leaves you longing for more of certain aspects of the story (don't humanise Jim Bakker, for fuck's sake, and the world of televangelism is done in a sort of montage and its true nasty harm is glossed over), there is enough here to love. The scenes of Tammy Faye questioning things about this all mirror nicely with the scripture and the trappings of her world, Vincent D'Onofrio makes for an uncanny and disgusting Jerry Falwell, and the film really sticks the landing: the shots of her imagining a choir as she sings are the sort of thing that the film could have used more of, playing with reality and expectation, getting more daring with it.
I make it sound like I'm dunking on this movie, and I'm not, I simply wish it were more daring. Chastain and Garfield are wonderful and the always appreciated but never fully-utilised Fredric Lehne gets quite high billing (for a change, yay!) as her stepfather Fred, who was my favourite character. Scenes with her and him (and her mother too) are nicely observed

The mentions of Reagan could do with more: he's like the "Kevin Bacon" of terrible things in America.

You'll know Fredric Lehne as this guy from "Men in Black", because there are not enough nerds who know that he was in "Lost" or "Con Air" or "Amityville 4"

Give this film a whirl!