Metro Pulse/Movie Guru/The Eyes of Tammy Faye

Movie Guru Rating:
Enlightening (4 out of 5)

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The Eyes Have It

A gabby, grabby documentary looks for the person inside Tammy Faye

by Jesse Fox Mayshark

The movie's called The Eyes of Tammy Faye, and it opens with a blurry close-up of exactly that: two azure starbursts of iris and mascara, eyelashes exploding out from the gauzy pupils like tarantula legs or bat wings. They are unmistakable and unforgettable, the objects of a thousand jokes over the past few decades, as exaggerated and immediately identifiable as Dolly's chest or Barbra's nose.

But, this unabashedly sympathetic documentary argues, nobody knows what it's like to be the sad one behind those blue eyes. In fact, and maybe not intentionally, the absurd and affecting life story of Tammy Faye Bakker-Messner makes the case that the woman is least known to herself.

Over that opening shot, we first hear her voice: "I think," she says sincerely, as if conveying a wisdom reached after years of contemplation, "the eyes are the windows to the soul." Her apparent sincerity in regurgitating such a brazen cliché—the first of dozens she mouths with conviction during the film—is both engaging and bewildering, and the filmmakers are smart enough to know it. The Eyes of Tammy Faye is marked by a strange tension between the anticipated cynicism of the audience and a total lack of cynicism on the part of the film's subject. Against considerable odds, it finds the perfect tone for a weirdly and distinctly American saga—campy at times, melodramatic at others, but rarely ironic or condescending. It's a remarkably sweet film about an unexpectedly likable, if ultimately tiresome, icon.

Tammy Faye was the oldest of eight children in a rural Minnesota family. The Eyes is weakest on her childhood, rushing without much explication through her formative religious experiences—her faith is presented almost as a pre-existing condition. But when her college years and her rapid engagement and marriage to a young traveling preacher named Jim Bakker come along, the film gets incisive and fascinating.

In following the Bakkers through their early career, it makes a persuasive argument for their primacy as pioneering televangelists. Starting with a Christian children's show on Pat Robertson's fledgling network (which featured Jim interacting with Tammy Faye's puppets), through Jim's founding of The 700 Club, through their partnership with Trinity Broadcasting honcho Paul Crouch, and ultimately to the founding of their own PTL network, the Bakkers were involved in almost every major step in the evolution of evangelical broadcasting. The sequence of video clips is a mesmerizing chronicle of an alternative America, the heartland flipside to the counterculture experience of the 1960s and '70s. The fashions, hairstyles, and music change with the times in a sort of broad pantomime of the jaded coastal cultures.

And just as liberal Baby Boomers reached a crisis in the '80s, with cocaine and conspicuous consumption taking the place of social crusdades, the televangelist world foundered in the Reagan years on the rocks of its own ambitions. The Bakkers were not the only ones to fall, but their collapse was the most spectacular. And, the movie reminds us, Tammy Faye bore the brunt of the public ridicule, even though it was her husband who dallied with Jessica Hahn and went to prison on fraud charges.

In its format and narrative arc—the familiar rise, fall, and supposed redemption—The Eyes of Tammy Faye plays like an extended version of one of those VH-1 Behind the Music specials. It even has deliberately overheated narration by drag queen RuPaul and a fuzzy video-to-film transfer that gives it the tawdry look of tabloid TV. But there's some inspired cheekiness, too—particularly in the intermittent chapter headings (e.g. "Enter the Dragon" to foreshadow the malevolent arrival in the story of the scheming Jerry Falwell), which are announced, fittingly, by sock puppets.

It also has a persistent subtext. Directors Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey are both gay, and they emphasize Tammy Faye's early outreach to AIDS victims and her unblinking empathy with gays and lesbians even as the Christian right was developing its Pink Scare tactics. The Rev. Mel White, a gay former associate of Falwell's, provides effective testimony on Tammy Faye's behalf, as does Jim J. Bullock, the HIV-positive co-host of her short-lived 1990s talk show.

But as much grist as the film supplies for contemplation of religion, sexuality, and the media in celebrity-crazed America, it mostly gives us Tammy Faye, in all her contradictory guises. She refers to herself over and over again as "a small-town girl," and yet there she is with her gaudy jewels and coiffed lapdogs, giving tours of her former mansions. She appears still wounded and baffled that anyone could have doubted her or her husband's sincerity, and at the same time she assures us that she is "really a very secular person." She does cry, yes, repeatedly and convincingly, but she also gets sassy and catty and coy.

And then there are the eyes, her own cartoons of herself, permanently (as we learn) tattooed with the heavy make-up she made famous. What, you can't help but wonder, is she hiding in there? She's no help at all, as seemingly oblivious as she is to her own motivations. The film only hints at an answer, but you can surmise pieces of it from all of her references to loneliness, from her daughter's account of lying silently next to her during Tammy Faye's cancer treatments, from her obvious, keening need for attention and approval.

Maybe the truest moment in the movie comes during an uncomfortably comical scene in which she pitches TV show ideas to a mildly annoyed USA network executive. "You like to be on camera, don't you," he says. Tammy Faye nods. "It's not a camera," she says. "It's people. It's someone to talk to."