Chastain’s Tammy Faye likely to hit Oscars’ spot




The Best Actress category is getting a lot of attention this Oscar season, not because it’s a close contest — Jessica Chastain playing over-the-top televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker looks like the odds-on favourite — but because it says a lot about what the Academy values, which often seems to be the most obvious but least interesting aspects of acting.

THE BIG PICTURE: Here’s a weird fact: there is no overlap at all between the five Best Actress nominations and the 10 Best Picture noms, or even the five films that garnered Best Director noms. There is just one scripting overlap, with Olivia Colman nominated for The Lost Daughter, which is also in the running for Best Adapted Screenplay.

In other words, these women are all acting their hearts out in movies the Academy has otherwise ignored.

In some cases, it means that the film is just not that good. The Eyes of Tammy Faye, for example, is a bubbly but disjointed and disappointing biopic. Still, one can’t help feel the current Academy doesn’t always value female-driven stories.

In Chastain’s case, this raises an intriguing question: Does managing to be good in a bad movie get her bonus points because she’s carrying everything on her (heavily padded) shoulders?

TRANSFORMATION: The Academy loves transformations, and Chastain is really out in front here. As it happens, 2022 is a very bad year to make the decision not to broadcast some of the Oscars’ technical categories, because the hair and makeup people on The Eyes of Tammy Faye, along with about a gallon of 1980s mascara, are absolutely crucial to their star’s success. (Chastain has announced she will skip the red carpet to be in the hall with her team when the winners of this category are announced off-screen.)

It’s not just lipliner and highlighter that matter, though. To play Tammy Faye, the angular Chastain had to be convincingly compact and chipmunk-cheeked, with an uptalking Minnesota accent. Plus, she needed to age several decades, from young and naive to middle-aged (and still somehow naive).

IMPERSONATION: The Academy loves transformations, but they especially love transformations into recognizable, real-life people. Chastain scores here, too, as Tammy Faye was famous for her look, her singing and her scandals. As a Reagan-era evangelical who reached out to the LGBTTQ+ community, she also became an unlikely gay icon.

Other nominees get points here. Kristen Stewart plays Diana, Princess of Wales, one of the most photographed women in history, in Spencer. But while The Eyes of Tammy Faye might be a weak film, this eerie, imagistic dreamscape is a polarizing one, which will probably count against Stewart.

Nicole Kidman won her first Oscar for playing Virginia Woolf with a prosthetic nose. In Being the Ricardos, she plays Lucille Ball, but while she captures the popular performer’s controlled, analytic perfectionism, she doesn’t really catch her comic chops in this oddly unfunny film.

INGENUE VS. VETERAN: The Academy tends to love veteran men and ingenue women. This year, we have four experienced women — Chastain, Colman, Kidman and Parallel Mothers’ Penelope Cruz. Stewart is the only Oscar rookie, but she isn’t exactly a standard ingenue, with her diffident, self-contained persona and her unwillingness to do sexed-up Maxim covers.

Switching over to veteran sub-categories, then, the Oscars sometimes overlook people who’ve won recently — like Colman, who snagged a statuette for The Favorite in 2019 — in favour of performers who seem overdue. This could help Chastain, who’s been nominated twice before but hasn’t yet won.

LIKABILITY: Men often get nominated for playing conflicted — or even outright horrible — people, but Best Actress nods often go to characters who are likable. The Eyes of Tammy Faye celebrates its protagonist’s open-hearted approach to the Bakkers’ work with The PTL Club. In one scene, Jerry Falwell (Vincent D’Onofrio) talks about taking up God’s fight, and Tammy Faye innocently asks, “Who’s He fighting?” And the movie lightly skates over her possible complicity with the Bakkers’ financial shenanigans.

TRAUMA: Finally, when it comes to women onscreen, the Academy loves Trauma with a capital T. Chastain is lucky again here. Tammy Faye was a known public crier (bonus points!), and her story involves an affection-starved childhood, an unhappy marriage to preacher Jim Bakker (played by Andrew Garfield with malign niceness) and a desperate need for affirmation from her beloved audience. There’s also a wonderfully messy middle sequence when Tammy Faye seems to be subsisting on Ativan, cake and Diet Coke.

The flipside to Trauma is, of course, Triumph. Tammy Faye also pulls off a really good redemption tale and a big musical finale that might just send Chastain over the finishing line on Oscar night.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca


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Alison Gillmor

Alison Gillmor
Writer

Studying at the University of Winnipeg and later Toronto’s York University, Alison Gillmor planned to become an art historian. She ended up catching the journalism bug when she started as visual arts reviewer at the Winnipeg Free Press in 1992.



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