Jessica as a dodgy TV evangelical? DIVINE
Ahead of actually seeing it, The Eyes Of Tammy Faye wasn’t meaning very much to me, titlewise at least. I knew it starred Jessica Chastain and Andrew Garfield but Tammy Faye? Nope, meant nothing.
It’s only when the film’s undeniably helpful opening adds the surname ‘Bakker’ that the mists started to clear and suddenly distant memories of fake eyelashes, blue eyeshadow and an awful lot of blonde hair around a notably square face began to become more solid. Ah, Tammy Faye Bakker, the American TV evangelist. Didn’t she go to prison?
Actually, it was her charismatic preacher husband, Jim, who went to prison. But this is their story, told through the strangely unseeing or possibly naive eyes of Tammy Faye, a woman seemingly blind to the multiple wrongdoings going on around her.
Which is a shame, as the wrongdoings are what made the Bakkers interesting as their telethon-funded Praise the Lord religious empire came crashing down in the 1980s. What this film needs is more of those wrongdoings, not fewer.
What rescues it from dud-dom, however, are five conspicuous successes. Hair, make-up and wardrobe departments all move into overdrive and do a terrific job of capturing an evolving sense of period as the central story unfolds over three decades. Fabulous too are the high-octane performances of Chastain and Garfield, with the former already picking up award nominations and tipped to secure more.
But let’s not get carried away – it’s all a bit one-note with the fakefeeling sincerity, constant smiling and ‘God told me He wants…’ of American TV evangelists providing all too easy pickings for actors of the calibre of Chastain and Garfield. But even their considerable talents can’t disguise the shortcomings in the screenplay or the sense that the really interesting stuff lies elsewhere.
It’s a little over a month since Don’t Look Up, the Netflix film about the discovery of a giant comet on a collision course with Earth, became one of the most talked-about films of the Christmas holidays. Now, by one of those spooky cinema coincidences, along comes Moonfall, which sees the Earth threatened, as the title suggests, by a rapidly descending Moon. The questions are – what changed the Moon’s hitherto stable orbit and can anything possibly be done to stop it?
Directing this impending extinction event is Roland Emmerich, who has already brought us the likes of Stargate, Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, and draws on elements from each of them without ever delivering the quality of any of them. This, in short, is a poor film – badly written, unevenly performed and struggling for a consistent tone and yet… whisper this softly, strangely enjoyable, too.
An impressively straight-faced Patrick Wilson plays Brian Harper, an unfairly disgraced former astronaut, while Halle Berry is his ex-wife and former Shuttle crewmate who just happens to become acting head of Nasa just as Armageddon – in more senses than one – looms. Think you can probably take it from there, although you may be surprised how long it takes and how silly it gets along the apocalyptic way.
Back in 2019, Joanna Hogg, a film-maker I described at the time as ‘the queen of middle-class arthouse awkwardness’, had something of a critical success with The Souvenir, detailing the destructive love affair between a wellto-do young film student (Honor Swinton Byrne) and a controlling older man, played by Tom Burke.
The Souvenir Part II doesn’t have the same box-office appeal, with the charismatic Burke departing the scene and Hogg embarking on a complex film-within-a-film (possibly within another film) structure that takes more unravelling than it really merits. Still, Tilda Swinton remains a tweed-clad joy as the posh, spaniel-owning mum.
Elsewhere, it’s a choice between the stunning animation but overambitious story-telling of Belle, a cautionary Japanese version of Beauty And The Beast involving an online alternative reality called U, and irrefutable evidence that some foolish, attention-seeking young men just never grow up.
Yes, a full 20 years after Jackass: The Movie, Johnny Knoxville and his prank-happy, painfully bruised gang are back with another set of stupid, stomach-churning stunts in
Jackass Forever. It takes barely a minute and one exploding mobile toilet to show that absolutely nothing has changed. Don’t say you haven’t been warned.