The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
A bedeviled icon’s ups and downs
Director and writer discuss film in which Jessica Chastain portrays the late televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker
When Jessica Chastain saw the 2000 documentary “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” the actress knew she wanted to make a feature film that would give her the chance to play Tammy Faye Bakker.
Bakker, who died in 2007, was the distinctively made-up Christian TV host who, with her husband, Jim, became televangelist TV stars. The pair raked in millions before suffering a public fall from grace in the 1980s that involved prescription drug abuse, sex scandals and financial fraud that ultimately sent Jim Bakker to prison.
The movie took years for Chastain, who optioned the rights in 2012 and serves as a producer, to get made, but its timing seems fortuitous as society is finally reevaluating the way we have thought about people like Bakker, Monica Lewinsky and Britney Spears. Chastain’s sympathetic portrayal apparently has the approval of both Bakker children who were involved in the making of the film.
In separate phone interviews, screenwriter Abe Sylvia and director Michael Showalter recently discussed what made Tammy Faye a worthy subject and what shaped the choices they made in telling her story.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q What drew you to the story? Sylvia: I grew up obsessed with Tammy Faye Bakker and saw the documentary five times when it first came out. I’d been developing another project with Jessica when she called and asked, “Do you know about Tammy Faye Bakker?” I got very excited. She had a very clear vision of what this movie could be.
This is the story of a woman who fell in love with a man who she thought shared her mission only to have him become corrupted and to have the whole thing fall apart and land on her head.
I think they’re incredibly relatable characters even if the scale of their lives is not.
Showalter: I like these characters that are misunderstood and outcasts. They’re sort of questionable in terms of their moral compass, incredibly eccentric, and idiosyncratic. I also liked the time period, and the costumes and the hair and the colors. It felt vibrant and very cinematic to me. That all made for a compelling story. And, of course, the opportunity to work with Jessica and to see what she would do with the role.
Q Monica Lewinsky, Britney Spears, now Tammy Faye Bakker were all women who became punchlines and were vilified by society and the media — often because of the misbehavior of a man — and who are now being re-evaluated in features, TV series or documentaries. Do you see this film as part of that larger shift?
Showalter: It seems to fit the mood of society; there’s this kind of reckoning about how these women suffered from a feeding frenzy in the media.
Sylvia: It definitely fits into that narrative, but I didn’t approach it that way. I didn’t want to write a polemic. We did make the conscious decision to say, ‘We’re not here to make fun of these people.’ Enough of that has happened already and it should never have happened in the first place.
Q One thing that was truly overlooked in the 1980s was how she was preaching love and compassion to gay people and AIDS patients despite the objections of evangelical leaders like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.
Sylvia: She was revolutionary not just in the electric church — very few mainstream talk shows were talking like this. In the media, AIDS and people who had AIDS were to be feared. The mainstream media later went on to publicly humiliate Tammy Faye Bakker, but she’d been the one to say hold these people in your arms.
Showalter: She was progressive in some respects. The intersection between spirituality and politics is where the problems are. Her belief system was very positive Christian principles but there was this larger political agenda that seeped into it.
Q Did she turn a blind eye to Bakker’s actions to maintain her power and her lavish lifestyle or was she legitimately in the dark?
Showalter: I want people to debate what they think Tammy did or didn’t know, I don’t have the answer. I certainly don’t think she was a conspirator. It’s possible she was blissfully ignorant. Her faith was very pure.
Sylvia: If you asked a million people, you’d get a million different answers. The key is the line that her mother says in the movie, ‘When you follow blindly, all you are in the end is blind.’ She followed this man, she followed this mission. She didn’t want to know so she didn’t know.
Q She lived an absurdly lavish lifestyle, which makes accusations of greed feel accurate.
Sylvia: One could characterize it as greed, but it’s right in line with what they were preaching. They were preaching prosperity doctrine — look at the things we have, that is proof of God’s love that we’re doing the right thing.
Q They later renounced that thinking as misguided.
Sylvia: I can’t ask her about that, I wish I could. My job was to say what was happening in the moment and what were the things she was telling herself to get through the day — what bargains was she making in her own soul, the way we make bargains in our own souls to get through the day?
Bakker, who died in 2007, was the distinctively made-up Christian TV host who, with her husband, Jim, became televangelist TV stars.
Q The movie shows clips of late-night shows making jokes about her but it doesn’t dwell on her reaction and the hurt and damage these comments might have caused.
Sylvia: I was more interested in how she persevered. She took all of this incoming fire and she never truly broke. She carried on with her mission.
Showalter: She lost everything yet held on to her positive attitude and her core belief system
Q You can argue the film seems to let Jim Bakker, who was convicted of a variety of fraud charges and served 5 years in prison, off easy; the postscript that doesn’t mention recent controversies including settling a lawsuit this summer over claims he made about a supplement he was selling to treat COVID.
Showalter: We just wanted to keep the focus on Tammy. But there’s a whole other story about Jim and how you could draw a straight line from the televangelist movement of the ’70s right through the Reagan and Bush presidencies and into our current political situation.
Sylvia: There’s so much about these folks we didn’t get to in a two-hour movie. The movie is about her and if people want to look at what became of Jim beyond that, there’s plenty of stuff out there in the public record.