Sunday Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Blinded by religion
Cert 12A ★★★ In cinemas now
After more than a hundred years of Hollywood movies, Brits are perfectly at home with FBI agents, hard-boiled private eyes and gun-toting cowboys. But some genres still don’t bridge the cultural divide.
US football dramas seldom touch down over here and this bizarre true story about a pair of famous American televangelists may also struggle to strike a chord with British audiences.
Set mostly in the 1980s, it explores the rise and previous fall from grace of Jim Bakker (Andrew Garfield) whose fraud conviction rudely but all too briefly interrupted his showbiz career. As the title suggests, the story is seen through the apparently innocent eyes of his weird wife Tammy Faye ( Jessica Chastain), a Christian pop singer who co-hosted his PTL (Praise The Lord) satellite channel.
Working off a 2000 documentary, scriptwriter Abe Sylvia shows sympathy for Tammy by sketching out her impoverished childhood in Minnesota.
At a bible college (me neither), she falls for slippery fellow student Jim, they marry and form a travelling roadshow where Jim preaches to adults and Tammy targets kids with a Christian-themed puppet show.
TV fame beckons so they launch their own channel and idiots inexplicably give them millions of dollars which they splurge on fur coats, naff furniture and a garish mansion. But cracks begin to appear when Jim hits on a dodgy investment scheme for a Christian-themed water park.
Chastain’s powerhouse performance is the stuff of Oscars, spanning decades and featuring some wonderfully camp musical performances.
However, despite highlighting Tammy’s laudable pro-gay rights intervention into the AIDS epidemic, Chastain never manages to sell her as a tragic heroine.
Was the corruption really all down to her husband? How does the televangelism con work? And how in God’s name did Jim manage to resurface during the pandemic to flog a fake Covid cure?
Jessica Chastain’s powerhouse performance is the stuff of Oscars