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The Eyes of Tammy Faye Movie Review

The Eyes of Tammy Faye is a 2021 biographical drama film directed by Michael Showalter and starring Jessica Chastain. It’s a weak movie, but Chastain is fantastic.

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“Oh, Tammy Faye. You follow blindly.

In the end, all you are is blind“

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The movie is about the extraordinary rise, fall and redemption of the famous televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker. First and foremost, the movie’s script is inherently problematic. As is the case with most biopics, a lot of liberties were taken with the material and the figure in question. This woman’s husband committed numerous frauds, but the movie jumped quickly over those events to focus more on the positive side of things.

The biggest issue is how it glorified Tammy Faye to the point that she did not seem like a real person. She was portrayed as overly admirable and virtuous while simply not feeling believable in the bigger scope of things. No matter how great the acting is, the characterization and the script were ultimately very inferior.

Yes, the acting is terrific. Andrew Garfield is fine, though this is far from his best roles. But Jessica Chastain is genuinely outstanding. She’s an amazing actress and the fact that she could find the humanity and the emotion behind all of her make-up and still deliver an impressive performance was admirable. She also sings in this movie and she has such a lovely voice!

Chastain powers through this movie to the point that she made it entirely her own. In fact, she is the only legitimate reason to even see the film that is otherwise mediocre and forgettable. It’s also overlong and far from particularly engaging as the pacing is weak and the tone is very troublesome. The movie never decides whether to settle on dramatic or lightweight and comedic. The best and most moving moments were the one that focused on Faye’s admirable LGBT advocacy.

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But that prosthetics work in The Eyes of Tammy Faye is incredible. Hollywood continues to make stupendous progress in this department with both this movie and ‘House of Gucci’ showcasing strides that have been made recently. Chastain’s cheeks look so real to the point that I found it jarring at first when I realized what was going on.

The Eyes of Tammy Faye is a forgettable, far from engaging biopic that is typically overly glorified in the portrayal of its central figure and too conventional in its narrative. The only reason to see it is for the amazing performance of Jessica Chastain. She managed to excel playing this role despite the heavy make-up put on her. The strides made in Hollywood in the prosthetics department during these last couple of years are also impressive.

My Rating – 3