The Eyes of Tammy Faye

Director Michael Showalter's riveting The Eyes of Tammy Faye proposes that the Bakkers (Jim and the eponymous Tammy Faye) were lovable loons who turned piety and pity into a global bonanza first through The 700 Club and later The PTL network.

The film's tone is split between the parodic (delivered mainly by Andrew Garfield as the boyishly goofy Jim) and the pathetic (captured in Jessica Chastain's uncanny impersonation of Tammy Faye). Though Showalter skewers evangelistic arrogance and fraudulence on occasion, the film is not at all condemning. In fact, it feels sympathetic and quite often kind toward the highly flawed Bakkers, who fell from grace after taking millions from listeners and supporters for their own enrichment.

Showalter begins the film with young Tammy Faye's conversion, which invites the audience to see later events through the eyes of a person desperate for love, perhaps imitating the spirit baptisms she'd observed to show she was accepted by God, and so must be by his followers, namely her disapproving mother, Rachel (a wonderful Cherry Jones).

Tammy Faye fed her need for love and attention through an ecstatic religious sect and later through amateurish puppetry, a marriage given to its own kind of fakery, mediocre vocalizing and make-up grotesqueries. Showalter's film sets Tammy Faye's life inside a frame of both devotion and delusion. And it's thoroughly captivating.