It had its world premiere this evening at the Toronto Film Festival and will open wide next Friday through Searchlight Pictures and Disney. The new film, also called The Eyes of Tammy Faye, while not sugarcoating matters, presents a portrait of its title subject in a largely empathetic way, thanks to a wonderfully authentic and rich performance from Chastain, who grabs on to those lashes and never lets go.
She would later become an unlikely gay icon to that community, even though on the surface she comes from a religious background that frowned on homosexuality. A few years ago the property fell into the hands of Jessica Chastain, who rightly knew this could be a hell and damnation part to play, and also a biopic that might go well beyond the surface of the public Tammy Faye known to many as tabloid material but who in real life was a person who reached well beyond the conservative roots of the Bakker televised ministry to be a supportive voice for the LGBTQ community (then not known by that moniker) and an understanding voice against the gay plague known AIDS.
