Jessica Chastain plays the famously made-up televangelist in 'The Eyes of Tammy Faye,' a movie that reconsiders what lay beneath all the sin and paint. onesarahjones writes
Photo: Lou Krasky/AP/Shutterstock Tammy Faye Messner never escaped her first husband. By the time of her death, in 2007, she was still best known for her marriage to disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker and for her own role in the South Carolina–based ministry they built up — literally in the form of a Christian theme park spanning 2,900 acres — and then destroyed with the force of their own greed. She became a national punch line for her elaborate makeup and gaudy clothes and high-pitched voice.
The Eyes of Tammy Faye begins with a story I cannot with absolute certainty say is based on fact but is definitely a version of events that real-life Tammy, born in 1942, endorsed: She is a girl, falling to the ground and speaking in tongues after defying her mother’s prohibition on attending church. Though Tammy grew up in a religious household, she’s a child of divorce, a great shame to her mother and to her mother’s congregation.
The sexism Tammy Faye faced was real too — and endemic to the modern Christian-right milieu in which she moved. A recent Christianity Today podcast, The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, drives home the extent to which popular ministers built, and still build, empires on the backs of women. It takes the example of another celebrity pastor, Mark Driscoll, who is prone to anonymous message-board rants about our “pussified nation” and about how “men are supposed to rule on Christ’s behalf.
The Bakker story was headline news in the ’80s and early ’90s. These days, audiences might be less familiar with Tammy or, if they know her at all, know only her face. To them, Tammy is a book with blank pages to be filled, worthy of attention because she is now the subject of a major film. Those who remember Tammy’s public story, however, will spend much of the film waiting to find out exactly how it plans to complicate its heroine.
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