Now I’m catching up on my streaming queue since I ended my monthly Alamo Drafthouse pass; I promise you and them I will be renewing it when money and time allow, aka, when there’s a string of movies close together that I want to see. Meanwhile, here’s where I left off with Hulu…
Tammy was an intriguing, entertaining and mostly fair treatment regarding PTL founders Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker with the focus mainly on the former. Contrary to the stereo-types of evangelicals, she grew up in Minnesota but belonged to a very strict congregation who treated her as subhuman because Tammy was her mother’s only child from a previous relationship. This didn’t deter her faith nor desperate need to be saved. Fast forward to seminary, she meets Jim Bakker. They fall in love because both believe their faith should be more joyous, more inclusive and they need to spread the good news. After they marry, they hit the road with Jim preaching and Tammy doing a puppet show at any church willing to have them. Eventually the duo get their break to appear on TV which leads them to join Pat Robertson’s slowly growing CBN empire. They quickly become the network’s big stars via their popular kiddie program. After Pat hijacks Jim’s idea for a Tonight Show targeted at Christians (The 700 Club), the Bakker leave to start their own flock with The PTL Club and clobber the competition by adopting satellite transmissions to all the growing cable TV operators.
The Bakker are immediate Christian superstars with their variety show modeled after Mike Douglas and Merv Griffin. Tammy Faye’s singing paired with Jim’s skilled interviews lead to the donations pouring in…sowing the seeds of their inevitable doom. Anyone over 40 knows what happened by 1987. For the under crowd, the movie explains.
Jessica Chastain, Andrew Garfield and Vincent D’Onofrio are all magnificent as Tammy Faye, Jim and Jerry Falwell. They portray them as real people, not clowns or cartoonish hillbillies. I’m confident that in the beginning, Jim and Tammy sincerely believed in their original mission. There was joy, inspiration and love over everything. It’s debatable when they became greedy shills or in the movie’s case, Tammy was just naive. I have doubts with the latter. Even mafia wives are very aware of how their comfortable lifestyles are made possible. A special call out goes to D’Onofrio as Falwell too. He brings a quiet menace the man always had so when he betrays the Bakkers in their hour of need, it smarts. Another reason I suspect he screwed them over, they were non-denominational, he was a leader in the SBC. Tammy proposes it was also Falwell’s revenge for Tammy Faye having a gay man with AIDS on PTL to raise awareness of the disease (Reagan and Falwell ignored it) and to preach compassion for the infected, not hate or saying they deserved their fate.
Overall I seriously recommend watching Tammy. It’s a fascinating time capsule and take on the rise of the Evangelical Movement which sadly hits higher than its weight in America politically. It’s also an amusing tale about a Macbeth-esque couple’s rise, fall and partial redemption since Tammy Faye Bakker continued to fight for the Gay Community until her death in 2007. Oddly, Jim returned to preaching after his time in prison. Their two kids grew up and became preachers too.