The Eyes of Tam­my Faye

Dis­guised in pan­cake make­up of steadi­ly increas­ing thick­ness, pros­thet­ic jaw padding that makes her look like a coun­try niece of GI Joe, and a Min­nesotan war­ble ret­ro­spec­tive­ly ren­der­ing Fargo’s accent work an exem­plar of reined-in nat­u­ral­ism, Jes­si­ca Chas­tain holds lit­tle back in essay­ing tel­e­van­ge­list Tam­my Faye Messner.

It’s a per­for­mance of unre­strained much­ness, though there’s no over­play­ing a woman defined by an irre­press­ible pep that brought her suc­cess as a children’s enter­tain­er that turned her into an aspi­ra­tional fig­ure for some and an object of ridicule for oth­ers. Chastain’s por­trai­ture moves to resolve that dis­so­nance by start­ing with the child­hood years and trac­ing Tam­my Faye’s psy­cho­log­i­cal fault lines back to their source, name­ly, mom­my issues.

Grow­ing up under an ascetic Pen­te­cost (Cher­ry Jones) guard­ed in her affec­tions cre­at­ed a hole in chip­munk-cheeked Tam­my Faye, which she’d spend her whole life try­ing in vain to fill with the love of her even­tu­al hus­band Jim Bakker (Andrew Garfield) and the extrav­a­gant wealth he’d bring her.

Some­where between real­is­ing why her mar­riage wasn’t work­ing, strik­ing up an almost-affair with anoth­er man, and devel­op­ing one of those pill addic­tions that always seem to creep in around the sec­ond act of movies like this, she strayed from the light. The rev­e­la­tion that the Bakker media empire she’d been cut into was built on fraud put her in the crosshairs of news­pa­per head­lines and late-night rou­tines spliced into the drama­ti­sa­tion, but Chas­tain casts her in a more sym­pa­thet­ic light, one that verges on absolution.

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As Tam­my Faye’s moth­er sum­maris­es in blunt made-for-the-trail­er dia­logue, her only sin was not greed or van­i­ty, but a will­ing­ness to fol­low too blind­ly. From the film’s slant­ed van­tage, she was actu­al­ly some­thing of an inspi­ra­tion, a go-get­ter gal mak­ing her way through a man’s world with a smile and a song; in one par­tic­u­lar­ly unsub­tle moment, she drags a chair across a back­yard cook­out to give her­self a lit­er­al seat at the table. In the impli­ca­tion that all this was Bakker’s doing while Tam­my Faye remained inno­cent­ly obliv­i­ous – she didn’t even know how much mon­ey she had, we learn – she’s let off the hook a bit too easily.

Those dis­co-Christ tunes, by the way, have been sung by Chas­tain in one of the flashier aspects of an all-the-trim­mings turn that betrays an award-hunger more often ascribed to Amy Adams. The mon­tage set to her throaty ren­di­tion of ​‘Jesus Keeps Takin’ Me High­er and High­er’ hits the fever pitch of camp that the Pla­ton­ic ide­al of this film would’ve main­tained for its entire run time.

No mat­ter what we might think of her, it’s clear that Tam­my Faye was one of a kind. Chastain’s man­nered plague of tics does right by her in that respect, but she’s been insert­ed into a tem­plate now worn from overuse.