I missed this biopic when it was newsworthy and later when it won two Academy Awards — for Jessica Chastain’s performance as the title character, and for the extensive makeup and hairstyling she endured — but have finally caught up to it.  Truth is, it’s just not my kind of movie.  I guess I have issues with stories about real people who present false faces to the public at large in order to take advantage of everyone they can, to accrue wealth and power for their own selfish ends.  Now, one can certainly make the case that my description does not fit Tammy Faye Bakker, at least not in terms of intent, and that gray area is what gives this drama its punch.  It still made me uncomfortable.

Michael Showalter’s drama follows Tammy Faye from her childhood, searching for spiritual fulfillment even then, through her relationship with evangelist Jim Bakker (Andrew Garfield), the launching of their television ministry and through incredible success to ultimate scandal.  The consistency is Tammy Faye herself (Jessica Chastain), a positive-thinking woman with a real talent for relating to other people, even as the world ultimately turns against her and her husband.  Miss Chastain’s performance is really, really good; Tammy Faye never becomes a caricature, or a martyr.  This is a compelling story because of the sincerity invested by the actress, and she fully deserved to win an Oscar for her efforts.

What makes me uncomfortable — then as now — is the artificiality and hypocrisy of the televangelists who surrounded her, starting with husband Jim Bakker.  Andrew Garfield tries to provide Bakker the same gravitas as his wife, but he cannot, because of his character’s innate flaws and weaknesses.  And the others, Jerry Falwell (Vincent D’Onofrio), Jimmy Swaggart (Jay Huguley) and Pat Robertson (Gabriel Olds) are portrayed (quite accurately, I think) as colluding bosses of the televangelical movement, wherein misogyny, snobbery, tyranny and racial and social discrimination dominate their private behaviors, even as they praise the Lord and ask for our hard-earned money.  They all give me the creeps.

Yet even as I shrink from these characters and the world they inhabit, I also realize that one can make a good, strong movie about almost anything, even them.  And this movie is pretty good.  I don’t think it goes nearly far enough in denouncing their hypocrisies, but it attempts, and largely succeeds, in presenting a balanced approach to its subject.  It is clear that Tammy Faye herself was a True Believer and that she was led astray; the question is how aware she was of her ministry’s duplicitous finances, and how much she did, or could have done, to avoid such corruption.  I tend to think she was much guiltier than this movie posits, and that’s another strike against it.  You’ll have to decide for yourself, and what the movie is conveying about her life and its ultimate meaning.  ☆ ☆ 1/2.  23 December 2023.