The Eyes of Tammy Faye
A biographical drama that tries to juggle too many tones—held together mostly by Andrew Garfield’s performance.
Date: January 6, 2023
Film: The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2021)
For me this film remained a big jumble, even though on paper it should be simple: follow a woman’s life story, see where she starts, how she becomes a TV star, and how it all falls apart. Instead it feels like a pile of loosely connected scenes. The film rarely bothers to stitch them together.
We begin when Tammy and Jim meet at Bible college, fall head over heels, and literally walk away from everything for love. That impulsive, often unexplained decision-making runs through the entire movie. One moment they are preaching somewhere, the next they are hosting a TV show, then they are at the helm of a Christian television empire swimming in money—until the whole thing collapses. In real life that process took time; here it plays like someone pressed fast-forward.
Their relationship never quite worked for me either. Supposedly it is a love story and a working partnership, but what we see is a toxic push-and-pull. Jim constantly wants more—more reach, more money—while Tammy just wants love and acceptance, yet almost no one says that out loud. Many of their decisions have no clear motivation; they simply happen. The financial and sexual scandals are portrayed the same way: they are present, but we rarely understand why the breaking point happens exactly when it does.
What bothered me even more is how subordinate the female perspective feels throughout. I know the era and the environment (the male-dominated world of 1970s and 80s American Christian television) pushed women into supportive roles, but the film only occasionally attempts to break out of that mould. The scene where Tammy speaks empathetically about AIDS and the LGBTQ+ community is powerful—it shows she was not a cartoon villain but a feeling human being—yet within the system she still ends up beneath everything.
Compared with online reactions I felt the film wanted to do too much at once. It tries to say, “Look at this bizarre, over-made-up woman,” while also insisting there was something deeply lovable about her, and simultaneously wants to tell the grand fall-from-grace story. Those three tones rarely fit together, and at times it feels like the runtime is simply too short for all of it.
I wrote that “Andrew’s performance is the only thing that saved the film,” and I stand by it. He was the anchor I could hold onto, the one character I could genuinely understand. I know everyone talked about Jessica Chastain, her Oscar win, and the award-winning makeup, but if you do not click with that exaggerated, ever-smiling, singing, false-eyelashed persona, it is perfectly reasonable to connect more with Andrew Garfield’s work.
The film itself is a mainstream 2021 biopic that broadly follows the real events—PTL, the TV show, financial scandals, Jim’s prison sentence—so the material is there. That is why I find it strange that the fiction sometimes tells us less than a handful of articles or the original documentary.
So for me it remains this: it could have been a strong story with a compelling character, but the film is too scattered and tries to do too much, so it never comes together. Without Andrew I would have written it off entirely.