Jessica Chastain changes her appearance and praises God in a sprawling biopic about the naivete and greed of religious organizations.
The story of famous American televangelists Tammy Fay and Jim Baker. From 1976 to 1987, the couple hosted Christian shows and built a powerful empire for making money, which eventually collapsed after a series of financial scams and sex scandals.
Glory, glory, hallelujah (famous Christian hymn - ed.), - a middle-aged woman in a wig with tattooed eyebrows and eyelashes, impressive manicure and covered with layers of foundation sings frantically at the end of the film. The audience is confused about how to react, they do not really understand, although they recognize the once-famous TV personality in the artist. No floor-length skirts and meek looks - since childhood, Tammy Fay wanted to be closer to God and people, followed the call of her heart, loved to live broadly and brightly, clearly inspired thousands of drag show participants, and in the middle of her life suffered from the selfishness of her beloved man and her own innocence ...
The film by Michael Showalter, the author of the soulful indie comedy Love is a Sickness, does not at all try to consider those “opposite eyes”, closing his own and by touch trying to recreate a portrait of an extraordinary personality, whose infectious evangelical essence and even more amazing kindness were taken as the basis stories. The only purpose of the picture is to demonstrate the talent of make-up artists and an individual actress, who took upon herself the unbearable burden of being in a chair for several hours and almost damaged (in her words) her own skin, hidden behind tons of makeup and silicone linings.
Such projects often and naturally appear during the fall-winter period, in the premium season, when the stakes jump and the struggle for statuettes of all sorts intensifies, and PR campaigns become similar to the Olympic Games. Chastain has no doubts about her chances, and we shouldn't, because her Tammy Fay supposedly serves as a revelation, a spiritualized camp and just an example of fearless dramatic talent, which, in fact, does not affect anything here. The actress, whose lucrative year in parallel continued with a remake of Scenes from Married Life on HBO, here sings, dances, wringing her hands, lamenting with a recitative that the equally obsessed character Paul Dano from "Oil" would envy, crying, giggling annoyingly and wants to embrace the immensity existing with the film in different planes. He goes all out at all at once, worships a deity named "Oscar", waits for good news.
"Eyes" let her down: the tape not only fails to cope with the abundance of information about the Bakers, but in every possible way evades answering the question of why viewers should be interested in this story at all today, in 2021. Learning to accept the world from Tammy despite a patriarchal religious background? Accepted, but why, then, only one scene is dedicated to this period, namely a conversation with an HIV-positive pastor, which is not further disclosed? Sympathize with the heroine herself, driven and suffering from a lack of marital attention? Find out about Tammy's status as an LGBT icon? Dream on, we don't have time for that.
Editors get bored, glue and cut scattered material, hallucinogenic songs from evangelical music compilations sound (special attention to the contagious Jesus Keeps Taking Me Higher and Higher and We’re Blest). Chastain is accompanied by Andrew Garfield in the guise of Jim Baker - a husband, showman, schemer who pockets donations from brothers and sisters in Christ. The actor is desperately trying to outplay his on-screen wife, but he fails literally everywhere, driving on tedious monologues and plastic tears flowing down a specially swollen face. Tremble, Jared Leto and Rami Malek, you are no longer alone in the dressing room.
“The Eyes of Tammy Faye” could be forgiven a lot if Showalter and his writers gave the picture at least some amount of self-irony. Instead, cinema resembles a large-scale finger theater, wanders between genres, gets tired (more than two hours with practically zero information about the heroine), stumbles drunkenly and believes that the Almighty will forgive everything. “God loves you, definitely loves you,” Tammy and Jim assure in unison. Maybe so, but the higher powers seem to have long since refused to believe in the creators of endless biographical films.
This article was sponsored by Muralidhar Ramamoorthy
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