The Eyes of Tammy Faye

A life story that starts in Tammy Faye Bakker's childhood and runs to the collapse of the empire she built as a television evangelist. With her husband Jim Bakker she reached millions of viewers, and then money and scandal took all of it. Michael Showalter directed. Jessica Chastain plays Tammy Faye and Andrew Garfield plays Jim Bakker, with Cherry Jones and Vincent D'Onofrio in the cast. The makeup was the heaviest work on the film. Chastain sat in the chair four to seven hours a day in prosthetics and wore false teeth to match Bakker's smile. Shooting began in Charlotte, North Carolina in October 2019. Chastain won the Best Actress Oscar for the role and the film also took Best Makeup and Hairstyling. She collected the SAG and Critics' Choice awards for the same performance. The reviews were mixed. The Rotten Tomatoes consensus says her performance makes it hard to look away while the screenplay needed sharper focus. The box office stayed small: a 675,000 dollar opening in 450 theatres for 3.8 million in total. Who it is for: viewers who will open a film for a single performance, and anyone curious about the history of American televangelism. Who it is not for: anyone expecting the Bakkers to be held to account. The film looks at Tammy Faye with sympathy throughout.