One of the most entertaining movies I've seen this year. Tammy Faye is a fascinating person, and the movie really allows you to see the real person under all the makeup. She is a truly interesting woman, and the movie shows her, warts-and-all, without being condescending to her love of Christ. On top of that, the movie does a great job at telling the story of the rise and fall of PTL from Tammy Faye's perspective. The filmmakers did a great job in finding and selecting hilarious and often bizarre clips from the annals of the CBN and PTL archives (one particularly funny bit shows Tammy Faye belting out a hymn while riding a camel, another where she wanders off the set of a live TV show to admire the fake beach scenery). One minor criticism is the filmmakers' overzealous attempts to tie Tammy Faye to the gay community, which seemed like a forced attempt to justify her "camp" value. For me, the most heartbreaking scene in the movie is when Tammy Faye is shown pitching ideas for TV shows to a secular producer--her ideas, though uncommercial, are genuine and it's touching to see them rejected on camera. The movie also gives us a sense of Tammy Faye's need to perform for the camera; in one sequence, she plans to confront a journalist who wrote an unflattering book about the PTL scandal, and by the end, Tammy is all too happy to autograph the very book that has caused her so much pain. Ultimately, I found Tammy Faye to be a sincere and optimistic woman who has both a neverending desire for stardom and and a neverending capacity to forgive.
Review of The Eyes of Tammy Faye
