Tammy Faye Bakker gets the celebrity biopic treatment in a new movie starring Jessica Chastain and Andrew Garfield.
If you were watching television in America in the 1970s and ’80s — the old three-network days that now seem as distant as the horse-and-buggy era — you could hardly miss Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. Upbeat evangelists with the upper Midwest in their voices, they helped expand Christian broadcasting from a niche into an empire via their PTL satellite network. Even if you missed them in their prime, you couldn’t avoid the spectacle of their downfall — an end-of-the-80s tabloid scandal involving adultery, hypocrisy and financial shenanigans. In 1989, Jim Bakker was convicted of fraud and sentenced to federal prison. His wife (who had divorced him a few years later) was razzed by talk-show hosts and standup comedians across the land for her gaudy makeup, her big hair and her full-throated singing voice. “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” directed by Michael Showalter from a script by Abe Sylvia, tells this story dutifully, following the familiar showbiz biopic sequence of rise, ruin and redemption.
