The Eyes of Tammy Faye

..and Tammy Faye through ours. Saw this tonight and it was so deliciously campy and downright funny ! TF is an accidental hoot most of the time as she takes herself so seriously and it is impossible for the audience to do so. I mean anyone who looks at the camera with 2 inches of industrial strength make-up on and says in all seriousness that she likes things real and natural is an unintentional standup comic. Did not like the gimmicky hand-puppets intro to each segment of the Jim and TF sorry saga. Liked how this gutsy, never say fail woman comes across, there's a naivete and sadness to her tackiness coupled with her real devotion to the lord. You just have to like her by movie's end.

This "Eyes of Tammy Faye" bio-documentary (from 1999) actually turned out to be a whole lot better than I had initially thought it would be.

The one thing that impressed me the most about this presentation was that is producers/directors, Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato did not shy away from clearly exposing all of the eye-opening "behind-the-scenes" fraudulence, corruption, and vicious back-stabbing that existed back then in the "holier-than-thou" realm of TV Evangelism.

Anyway - This documentary's star interviewee, Tammy Faye Messner died of cancer (in 2007) at the age of sixty-five.

I expected this movie to be either a sensational, supermarket-tabloid, scandal-spewing freak show; or a cruel, cynical put-down - like an extended Saturday Night Live skit with her as the guest host, an unwitting stooge playing herself for ridicule. It's neither.

I'm surprised and delighted to find that - far from being either sentimental or campy, or sensational, OR abusive - this movie treats Tammy Faye with the seriousness and respect she deserves. It approaches her as a person worth getting to know, and it proceeds to let us get to know her.

It's a fascinating movie about a fascinating, one-of-a-kind human being. Underneath the (tattooed-on) makeup and behind the notoriety, she was - all along - a sweet, gentle, loving, extravagantly generous woman, eager to share God's love and (even more important) her OWN love with the whole wide messed-up world.

She embraced gays - with AIDS – when AIDS was still new and terrifying, when all her "Christian" peers were preaching that we deserved what we got. She was never afraid of looking like a fool or of confronting her own and other people's flaws; and she never wallowed in resentment or self-pity - after her whole world imploded she got up and she got out and she DID.

I thank the producers of this movie for showing her exactly as she was. The Christians who despise gays are no more hypocritical and evil than the secular people who despise Tammy Faye because she's different.

She fits no stereotype, any more than I fit any stereotype of what a gay man should be. Even at the height of her success she was an outsider at heart, a misfit, an oddball. Just like me. But unlike me she was an open-hearted, inclusive, insanely compassionate and loving person. I admire her greatly, and I love her a lot.

In a year where its easier to form a ten worst list than a ten best list, "The Eyes of Tammy Faye" is a breath of fresh air in an otherwise stale landscape of formulaic, uninteresting, and generally BAD productions made by the Hollywood machine.

But, "Eyes" is more than simply the recent Biography of Tammy Faye on the big screen. No no no! "The Eyes of Tammy Faye" tells a solid story about a family's reversal of fortune, and one woman's really hard struggle through a life which is far from being complete. And the best (or worst, depending on who you are) part is, its a true story. There aren't any plots to "buy in to" or any storylines that make you go "huh?".

For the most part, the story is very first-person, although Drag Queen Ru Paul Charles helps us along in times when the story needs that next advance.

Its a documentary which reads more like a movie... and, as one IMDB reviewer has already said, you laugh, you cry, you NEED the waterproof mascara.

The filmmakers, whilst it appears at time are getting their kicks out of putting Tammy Faye on the big screen, are (for the most part) sincere in their telling of the tale. They treat Tammy Faye with dignity, but also acknowledge a certain "kitsch" there is to the whole PTL saga.

Whether you love her, hate her, or are totally uninterested in her, "The Eyes of Tammy Faye" will bring you closer to Tammy Faye, and provide golden nuggets of insight in to who she really is as a person. In the end, you leave feeling ashamed... she's no different than anyone else, trying to carve out their mark in the world. And if you feel that, if you can immerse yourself in split-seconds of guilt throughout the film, the filmmakers have accomplished their goal. She is no longer an enigma... she is human. She is, Tammy Faye.

10/10

I had no idea what to expect from this documentary about the life of the recently deceased Tammy Faye Bakker/Messner. Back in the '80's my wife was a fan of the Bakker's; I never was. I never cared for their glitzy, showy style of ministry and I never cared for the constant appeals for money, money and more money or the theology that seemed to say that if you didn't have a lot there was something wrong with you. Having said that, I can't deny that their ministry had a positive effect on many people even though I was largely revolted by it. So, I watched this out of curiosity. Tammy Faye is, after all, a fascinating person; one who has stepped out of what would normally be thought of as the traditional "fundamentalist" circles to embrace a variety of people as personal friends, from homosexuals to porn stars while still identifying herself very much as an evangelical Christian. For that, she deserves applause.

Narrated by drag queen RuPaul Charles (which says something about the esteem in which Tammy Faye is held in circles not normally friendly with evangelical Christianity), the documentary is very friendly to Tammy Faye, and it certainly exposes the sordid side of the ultra-wealthy and ultra-powerful Christian broadcasting community. (I don't like to speak ill of the dead, but Jerry Falwell - who I also never liked a bit - comes across here as a mean-spirited, power-hungry hypocrite, and that's being kind as well as probably true!) The first half of the documentary deals with the rise of Jim & Tammy's PTL Ministry and the problems that caused for them even while it was becoming a huge success. Speaking as a pastor, I must confess to a certain amount of sympathy for the televangelists. No one goes into ministry expecting to become rich and powerful, and when that happens to a very few, those very few probably get more easily overwhelmed by it and caught up in it than those who've planned for wealth and power all their lives, simply because it's so unexpected and they're so unprepared for it. The documentary certainly shows that trap overcoming Jim Bakker (and, to a lesser degree - perhaps because it's filmed from her perspective - Tammy Faye.) I found the PTL story both fascinating and tragic. The second half of the movie documents Tammy Faye's life post-PTL. It's an impressive story of a woman learning to stand on her own and overcoming some pretty big odds to do it. The story only goes as far as her second husband Roe Messner's release from prison after serving two years for bankruptcy fraud, so there's nothing about her spin on "The Surreal Life" or her final days before her cancer finally took her life.

Tammy Faye was a fascinating person. Even those who weren't fans of hers can enjoy and appreciate this film. I know that because I wasn't a fan and I did enjoy this. The only truly irritating part was the puppets who introduced each segment! Losing a mark also for being obviously biased, I still give this an 8/10.