BEFORE: Finally getting back to my second job tonight, that's why I'm late in posting. I missed a lot in two weeks, like a free screening of "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness", and a bunch of student films - it's near the end of the school year and the college kids are getting their thesis films done, and shown on the big screen. I missed about five shifts due to COVID, and now I'm playing catch-up, they've offered me so many shifts in May June that I should be able to keep the money coming in, I guess I can sleep when I'm dead.
Andrew Garfield carries over from "Never Let Me Go", and I get to cross off another Oscar winner from my list, this one won for Best Actress and Best Hair and Make-Up, just a couple months ago.
THE PLOT: An intimate look at the extraordinary rise, fall and redemption of televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker.
AFTER: Well, I passed on watching this last September at work, as I just couldn't see how I could fit it in my 2021 chain - then I watched "Tick, Tick...Boom!" a few weeks ago in April, and I couldn't fit this in there either, because Easter was coming up, so I'm glad I was able to circle back to it.
I remember when Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker dominated the news cycle in the late 1980's, after certain financial misdealings were revealed, then a sex scandal or two, then the couple broke up and Jim Bakker went to prison, and by now a lot of the players in this saga are deceased, like Tammy Faye and Jerry Falwell, so their story can finally be turned into a drama, not just a documentary. There's a lot here that I didn't know, like that Tammy Faye started out doing Christian-based puppet shows.
Look, I've been around a long time, I was a Catholic altar boy back when I was a kid, then I went to film school and fell in with a bad crowd - I'm talking about independent filmmakers. But it could have been worse, when I started in the film industry it was as a production assistant on music videos and a few things that looked like music videos but were done for Sesame Street, so for a couple years there I had connections at CTW and Henson Studios, but something deep down just told me to stay away from the puppeteers, they're just a weird bunch. (I don't think my instincts were wrong, there have been scandals in all forms of entertainment over the years, and puppetry is no exception...). But the common thread in my experiences is that once I get a peek behind the curtain, I see that there's no real mysteries involved, whether that's in the church or the moviemaking world, the principle's the same, it's all a bunch of smoke and mirrors, there's no real THERE there, just a bunch of charlatans. But at least the filmmakers are HONEST about the fact that they're trying to deceive you, with editing, special effects, make-up, etc. The preachers and priests are worse because they'll lie to you and swear again and again that they're telling the truth, while asking for your money, so they're at least as bad as politicians, probably worse in my book, because we NEED politicians, we don't need preachers.
Still, they're cut from the same cloth - and it's worse when they overlap, like with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who wanted to get religion and politics all mixed together, even though we've got a U.S. Constitution that says that's a really bad idea, and against the law. But the "Moral Majority" in the 1980's supported candidates with the same agenda, which was anti-feminist, anti-homosexual, anti-liberal, anti-abortion and so on. Hey, if you missed this period in history, I've got some news, it looks like this is all making a comeback! It's throwback Thursdays every day once the Supreme Court overthrows Roe v. Wade...
Tammy Faye was actually the decent one, she believed that gay people were, you know, people, too, and she was willing to talk to them and hear what they had to say and give them a platform, perhaps when no other religious figures would. Her husband Jim toed the party line and got flak from Falwell for Tammy Faye's simple decency, and the ironic thing about that is that there were rumors about Jim Bakker's own sexual preferences over the years - the film tonight shows Tammy Faye catching her husband in a "tickle fight" with another man, and well, we all know what that probably meant. But there was a scandal with him and another woman, Jessica Hahn, but this film explains that away as a sign of him overcompensating or something. I don't know, the thing I remember most about Jim Bakker, for some reason, is that when times got tough after all the scandals, he consoled himself by drinking heavy cream - straight, no coffee involved - and I just don't know how anyone can DO that, it's certainly not recommended.
Anyway, the film follows Jim and Tammy Faye from their meeting in Bible College in Minneapolis, through their very quick courtship, marriage and then running that puppet show on Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network, then Jim becoming the host of The 700 Club. After hooking up with Falwell, Jim and Tammy started their own TV network, PTL, which stood for "Praise the Lord", though later all the jokes were about how it really stood for "Pass the Loot". Tammy started a singing career, if you can call it that, and got a little flirty with a record producer, meanwhile Jim started building a Christian theme park, and Tammy also got addicted to pills.
Then came the scandals, as the PTL Network went into debt and people started inquiring about where all the donated money had gone. News of Jim's affairs came to light, and all the things they owned, like an air-conditioned doghouse and gold-plated bathrooms, fur coats and other opulent things. Tammy Faye stood by and publicly supported her husband as he was convicted of fraud, then she divorced him while he was in the joint. Pay attention to the character of Roe Messner, the one helping to design the theme park, because that's who Tammy Faye married next. He also served time for fraud, connected to the construction industry, which might be the only industry more corrupt than politics or organized religion.
Tammy Faye went on to publish her autobiography and made a few appearances on sit-coms in the 1990's, also the reality show "The Surreal Life", and she became a gay icon to boot. But by the 2000's she'd been treated for colon cancer, lung cancer, and fought those diseases for 11 years, but died in hospice care in 2007. Nobody really deserves that, not even a person who lived in the intersecting worlds of preaching and puppetry.
What astounds me is that Jim Bakker served time for fraud, Falwell was an absolutely terrible human, and time and time again in America one evangelist preacher after another is charged with fraud or accused of misconduct, and overall, nobody seems to put the pieces together to realize that they're ALL corrupt. They're all selling a bunch of lies to the public, collecting donations and not paying taxes on them - what's wrong with this picture? It's time to remove the tax-exempt status for religious organizations and make everyone pay their fair share. Remember, we're supposed to have a separation of church and state in this country, it says so in the Constitution, so that means no special treatment for churches or religious personnel. Right?
Also starring Jessica Chastain (last seen in "It: Chapter Two"), Cherry Jones (last seen in "A Rainy Day in New York"), Vincent D'Onofrio (last seen in "Escape Plan: The Extractors"), Mark Wystrach, Sam Jaeger (last seen in "Catch and Release"), Louis Cancelmi (last seen in "21 Bridges"), Gabriel Olds, Fredric Lenhe (last seen in "Human Capital"), Jay Huguley (last seen in "12 Years a Slave"), Chandler Head (last seen in "The Boss"), Randy Havens (last seen in "Geostorm"), Grant Owens, Coley Campany (last seen in "Dumplin'"), Lindsay Ayliffe (last seen in "Shock and Awe"), Alan Boell, Lila Jane Meadows, Carolyn Mints, Elizabeth J Branca, and the voice of Jess Weixler (also last seen in "It: Chapter Two")
with archive footage of Jim Bakker (last seen in "Let's Go to Prison"), Tammy Faye Bakker, Tom Brokaw (last seen in "Empire State"), Delta Burke, Johnny Carson (last seen in "Robert Klein Still Can't Stop His Leg"), Jay Leno (ditto), Dana Carvey (last seen in "Spielberg"), Dan Rather (ditto), Jerry Falwell (last seen in "The Last Thing He Wanted"), Bryant Gumbel (last seen in "Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project"), Ted Koppel (ditto), Jessica Hahn, Phil Hartman, Jan Hooks, Sam Kinison, Ronald Reagan (last seen in "Take Me Home Tonight"), Pat Robertson, Charlie Rose (last seen in "Zappa"), Maria Shriver, Jean Smart (last seen in "Life Itself")
RATING: 6 out of 10 cans of Diet Coke
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