“The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” June 10, 2022 (2021), DVD. Jessica Chastain won an Oscar and SAG for best actress for her portrayal of Tammy Faye Bakker. The film dramatizes her marriage to Jim Bakker (a slimy, duplicitous Andrew Garfield) and their rise to and fall from fame and fortune to bankruptcy and prison as TV evangelists and religious theme park entrepreneurs.
It chronicles their ministries as electronic shepherds who shear their flocks daily and demonstrates their grotesque consumption that earned them the ire and envy of Pat Robertson and, especially, Jerry Falwell (a vicious and almost unrecognizable Vincent D’Onofrio). Chastain excels as the more complex and accepting TF who opens her drug and diet-Coke addled heart to the gay community (and her closeted husband) even as homophobes like Falwell spew their venom. Their relationship was an exploding clown car that rightly drew ridicule for its criminality, its hideous lies, its carny-like cons and abuse of its vulnerable audience, and its grotesque flamboyance. Robertson and Falwell, however, were then, and remained, more dangerous in their political ambitions and alliances bringing the Religious Right to new levels of power in the GOP.