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plot summary: This is the story of Tammy Faye Bakker, who, with her husband Jim, built one of the strongest Christian networks in the world. It shows the deceit and greed that destroyed their empire, and how Tammy Faye managed to pick herself up again and go on with life.
review: I'm a sucker for biographies. I love watching the E! True Hollywood Story and VH1's Behind The Music, regardless of who the subject matter is. So, despite the fact that I am not religious and even though I knew absolutely nothing about the PTL and Jim & Tammy Faye, I really, really enjoyed this documentary! I mean, as Mike and I left the theater together, I just would not shut up about it! I kept raving, "If Jim just would've kept his stupid pants on!!!!" and Mike just smiled politely and patted me on the shoulder. ; ) Hee hee!
You can't help but feel enraged after seeing this. I think the directors tried to be fair and unbiased in retelling the story of Jim & Tammy's rise from young, enthusiastic Christians to older, ambitious Televangelists. There are several scenes of Tammy clicking her long garish fingernails against her typewriter keyboard, composing letters to her old foes Jessica Hahn and Jerry Falwell asking them to be interviewed for this movie. Sadly, they all declined. Even people who were supposedly "old friends" of Tammy declined to be interviewed...
So, yes, obviously, the movie builds a huge sympathy for Tammy. Honestly, after seeing this movie, I just wanted to send her a huge bouquet of flowers. I mean, really! The movie paints such a sad portrait of Tammy, you just want to give the girl a hug. There are scenes of Tammy reading her painfully-adolescent poetry, lines of loneliness and verses of pain. There's a scene where Tammy is pitching ideas for television shows to a hipster producer, these lame ideas that just make you groan, but she believes in them so deeply! And in yet another scene, she finally confronts a journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for his work on the whole PTL scandal. And despite her pain and hurt, when he asks her to autograph the very book detailing the unraveling of her work and marriage, she cheerfully smiles and signs away!
One thing that kind-of bothered me about the film was that I felt it kind-of teetered between being a serious documentary and being kitschy. The introductions into the different chapters of the story are brought to you by two goofy, giggly puppets. Now, Mike and I are totally pro-puppet, but it just seemed a little unnecessary to me. Like they were just trying too hard to be "campy," like, "Oh, let's appeal to the gay community by getting RuPaul to narrate and using kitschy puppets..." That's fine if they wanted to go in that direction, but like I said, they seemed to teeter between the two.
Not that it would have been a bad thing to go in the kitsch direction! Tammy Faye is probably one of the first famous Televangelists to reach out to the gay community, interviewing a man with AIDS on the PTL network way back in the early 80's. And when you begin to doubt this woman's integrity, wondering if the film is just painting her in an overly-sympathetic way, I think watching this scene will remove any doubt of credibility for this woman! I mean, back in the early 80's, people thought you could catch AIDS from kissing or using a public toilet...I think it shows amazing integrity. : )
This is really a fascinating profile on a (verrr-rrry) interesting woman. See it if you can! ; ) (janice.00)
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