Much like 1997's "Boogie Nights", "The Eyes Of Tammy Faye" deals with the rise and fall of a well-intentioned protaganist and the glitzy, overindulgent world that brought them down hard. But where "Boogie Nights" was a huge, cinematic, sprawling work, "The Eyes Of Tammy Faye" is a little movie who's tone and mood outsize its aspect ratio. This, however, plays to its advantage.
The life story of Tammy Faye Bakker-Messner is straight melodrama. Small town girl makes good. She meets Jim Bakker, they pay their dues in the early years of serious Christian television programming, and ultimately, attain a kind of success that most people should never know: a success so blindingly unconditional that no error need be noted until it's too late. Eventually, as these people get their come-uppance for their sins, their world not only falls apart, but they do too.
The film (narrarated by RuPaul) gives us a lighthearted, non-judgmental look at Tammy Faye, and while it is a story worth being told, one often feels like they've seen it before. Filled with the same kind of MTV-inspired edited (lots of information thrown at you as quickly and as often as possible), it is a carbon copy of every "E! True Hollywood Story" in existence. And that's how it seems the directors (Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato) want it. Scored at times with epic, Carmina Burana-type thunder songs, the movie (which features mockingly wholesome puppets doing chapter stops) nearly bursts at the seams with points and counterpoints. Right down to the censoring of profanity, it feels like it was made for television. It is a very well done cinematic manifesto by which Tammy Faye can plead her case into immortality. But other than its downsized big-ness, it's big flaw is that it spends *too* much time trying to immortalize Tammy Faye as if we weren't already sympathetic. They relentlessly tug on our heart strings, and the audience is laughing so hard from a funny sequence that they are too busy to notice.
The life story of Tammy Faye Bakker-Messner is straight melodrama. Small town girl makes good. She meets Jim Bakker, they pay their dues in the early years of serious Christian television programming, and ultimately, attain a kind of success that most people should never know: a success so blindingly unconditional that no error need be noted until it's too late. Eventually, as these people get their come-uppance for their sins, their world not only falls apart, but they do too.
The film (narrarated by RuPaul) gives us a lighthearted, non-judgmental look at Tammy Faye, and while it is a story worth being told, one often feels like they've seen it before. Filled with the same kind of MTV-inspired edited (lots of information thrown at you as quickly and as often as possible), it is a carbon copy of every "E! True Hollywood Story" in existence. And that's how it seems the directors (Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato) want it. Scored at times with epic, Carmina Burana-type thunder songs, the movie (which features mockingly wholesome puppets doing chapter stops) nearly bursts at the seams with points and counterpoints. Right down to the censoring of profanity, it feels like it was made for television. It is a very well done cinematic manifesto by which Tammy Faye can plead her case into immortality. But other than its downsized big-ness, it's big flaw is that it spends *too* much time trying to immortalize Tammy Faye as if we weren't already sympathetic. They relentlessly tug on our heart strings, and the audience is laughing so hard from a funny sequence that they are too busy to notice.