The Eyes of Tammy Faye, review: a flat, formulaic biopic with laughable prosthetics

We can discuss the eyes of Tammy Faye in a moment. But first, can we talk about the poor woman's cheeks? I should stress they’re not the ones which actually belong to the actress Jessica Chastain, who plays Tammy Faye Bakker in this by-the-book biopic about the disgraced American televangelist. Rather, they’re a pair of prosthetic enhancements: two peach-plump latex bulges, digitally smoothed to a doughnutty glaze.

Honestly, cheeks this pronounced may have not have been seen in cinemas since Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel. And Chastain’s co-star Andrew Garfield, who plays Jim Bakker, Tammy Faye’s husband and business partner, sports a pair too in his character’s younger scenes. However much time and expertise went into crafting these cheeks, they’re obviously not human, and are distracting and occasionally unsettling. So why do it in the first place?

The answer, of course, is that the Academy Awards are just seven weeks away, and it’s much easier to sell a performance as transformative these days when you can only half-recognise the actor who’s giving it. (See also the lightly remoulded Nicole Kidman in Being the Ricardos: at the time of writing, she and Chastain both appear to be dead cert Best Actress nominees.)

For audiences who don’t have Oscar or Bafta ballots to tick, however, the result is a film which feels uncomfortably like a shop window, flogging an unmissable three-for-one deal on acting, make-up and visual effects. (Get it while stocks last.)

From their rise in the 1960s to their very public fall from grace, the Bakkers were also selling something, and selling it hard. A pair of married Bible college dropouts, their travelling ministry – songs, puppets and preaching – won them a children’s show on the Christian Broadcasting Network, which led to them founding a religious channel of their own, the PTL (short for ‘Praise The Lord’) Television Network.

Contrary to Christ’s advice in St Matthew’s Gospel, the Bakkers enthusiastically laid up for themselves treasures upon Earth, and lived in considerable luxury on their viewers’ generous donations, until PTL’s collapse in the late 1980s amid scandals both sexual and financial.

As the title suggests, the film sets out to relate the Bakkers’ tale from Tammy Faye’s perspective. But what it actually does is stick rigidly to the threadbare Oscar biopic formula that was spoofed into oblivion 15 years ago by Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, and viewers familiar with that devastating comic takedown of the genre may find it impossible to take seriously.

It doesn’t help that the film adopts a bland rote-prestige style, and actively shies away from, rather than embracing, the almost Lynchian oddness of the US evangelical scene. And it’s straightforwardly cowardly on the question of Tammy Faye’s own faith, offering no sense of how much of her Christian teaching was marketing, and how much she actually believed.

A Wolf of Wall Street-like treatment of this story could have been a scream – and the details are more than bizarre, crass and damning enough to have supported it. But cheeks aside, this is flat, colourless stuff.

12A cert, 126 min. In cinemas from Feb 4