Presented in San Sebastian, where Jessica Chastain won the Silver Shell for Best Actress, ‘The Eyes of Tammy Faye’, entertaining and well acted, is less complex than expected
After passing through the Toronto Film Festival, ‘The Eyes of Tammy Faye’ could be seen in San Sebastian, a proper biopic starring Jessica Chastain with excellent chemistry, who shares the tremendous ‘Agents 355’ on the current billboard, and Andrew Garfield, whose career has surprisingly climbed several rungs after the premiere of the latest Spider-Man. Suddenly, his much-maligned Peter Parker in ‘The Amazing Spider-Man’ mini-saga has scored points on the internet, confirming how social media can bring you down or lift you up to the altars in a matter of seconds for no consistent reason. This film speaks precisely of boom and bust, whose extraordinary cast is the best of the lot. The evangelist televangelist Tammy Faye, who is well-made up as the protagonist of the recommendable ‘The Sloane Affair’, Silver Shell for best actress ex aequo with Flora Ofelia (‘As in Heaven’), had a meteoric career in the 70s and 80 that was truncated when -apparently- the cake was discovered. After that image of self-improvement, love and understanding that she shared with her husband, she built a business with financial black holes.
The scandal shook the foundations of a religious empire that had a theme park that can be seen as a metaphorical caricature of the disproportionate success of the Bakker couple. Completing the cast are Cherry Jones (‘Succession’), Gabriel Olds (‘The Substitutes’) Fredric Lehne (‘The Greatest Showman’), Mark Wystrach (‘Wild Hearts’), Sam Jaeger (‘Shazam!’), Chandler Head (‘The Glass Castle’) and the always charismatic Vincent D’Onofrio, with a prolific filmography lately on the multiscreen (don’t miss him in ‘The Godfather of Harlem’ and as Marvel’s villainous Kingpin).
Together with a devoted Chastain, whose magnetism within the frame is lately being wasted in proposals with questionable commercial flair, except for the miniseries ‘Secrets of a Marriage’, available on HBO Max, Garfield does a good job in front of the camera, revealing himself as a Cult actor endorsed for his work in ‘What Silver Lake Hides’ or the recent ‘tick, tick… Boom!’, released directly on Netflix. ‘The Eyes of Tammy Faye’, directed with modest skill by Michael Showalter (‘The Great Love Sickness’), is built on a cliché, squeezing all the clichés of the genre at the service of a more contained story than expected by dealing a subject traversed by excess. The Bakkers sold smoke with amazing ease. Their capacity as charlatans was great, oversized by television in an age without the Internet.
An image from ‘The Eyes of Tammy Faye’.
The film is based on a homonymous documentary and what is interesting about the result is that it does not only focus on pointing out the alleged corruption of the couple, it also opportunely points out the role of the sensationalist media, delighted to be able to play with information that gave rise to humiliation. extreme public where a certain misogyny was also present. Tammy Faye’s unstoppable success was disliked in some circles and had to be stopped, regardless of the goings-on in her thriving religious business. The tape is redeeming with her character, one more example of the lights and shadows of the country of stars and stripes, where you can become a billionaire but not without consequences.